


In Servitium Lucis

by gloriouswhisperstyphoon



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: AU - Assassin's Creed Fusion, F/M, I'm not joking - Freeform, Immortality, Severe Mental Issues, historical fiction - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-18
Updated: 2019-07-06
Packaged: 2019-10-12 10:23:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 13
Words: 22,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17465738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloriouswhisperstyphoon/pseuds/gloriouswhisperstyphoon
Summary: It’s been said that the past never dies, but it is carried with us wherever we might walk.Cassian Andor has always convinced himself that he was a madman, that he kept seeing things that weren't there. But there's a war coming, and something even more terrible after that, and he might be the only one who can stop both.





	1. The Eagle Bearer

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to the long-gestating rewrite of my Assassin's Creed AU (which is actually awful, please don't read it)!
> 
> A few things to know before this starts:  
> 1\. The Animus is a machine that can make a person relive their ancestors' memories, but with the nasty side effect of inducing insanity.   
> 2\. There are two huge organisations called the Assassins and the Templars, who have been fighting a secret war since the beginning of time.

It’s been said that the past never dies, but it is carried with us wherever we might walk. 

And so it is, and so it has always been. 

But while this story might be about the past, it starts with a girl.

And at this moment, that girl is waiting for the men on horseback to come for her and her family. 

When they came, they came amidst the rain and the cold, a lone eagle crying out in the skies above while a little girl came sprinting into her family’s home, her braids damp and her boots all muddy. 

“Mama, Papa! They’re coming for us!” Jyn cried out, her little girl’s voice still high pitched and as terrified as any would be in these circumstances. 

Her parents’ faces were sharp and drawn, a spear held firmly in her mother’s hand and seeming to glow with an eerie green light, ready as they had ever been. 

“We know, little one,” Lyra said, before leaning down to kiss her daughter’s forehead. 

She took a deep shuddering breath, before clutching the spear tighter and walking towards the doorway. 

Galen shook his head and started shoving Jyn towards the thatched back wall of the house, the hidden doorway almost imperceptible to anyone who had not been shown it before. 

“Go, Jyn!” he hissed, his face white and pinched. “You cannot be here when they come!”

“But what about you?”

“That doesn’t matter,” Lyra said, giving her a hard shove. “We’ll meet up again soon enough, little one.”

Jyn didn’t need to be told twice. She slid through the little hidden opening and started running from the village as fast as she could, away from the cliff that it stood proudly upon, her bag thumping hard against the back of her legs and her heart thumping hard inside her chest. 

Wait.

Mama and Papa hadn’t left. 

What were they doing?

Far in the distance, Jyn could see them.

Horsemen, their armour gleaming brilliant in the dying rays of the sun and the tips of their weapons wickedly sharp. 

She took a deep breath and crouched down, praying to Bel and Sulis that the earth would cover her from their gaze. 

Where were Mama and Papa?

Why weren’t they coming to meet her?

There was a flicker of movement as the men got off their horses, the clinking of their armour loud and harsh in her ears. 

Jyn crouched down lower, waiting for a sight of her mother. 

The leader of the troop pulled up his horse, grimacing as his white robes brushed against the muddy soil before raising his voice to shout, while the rest of his men stormed the other houses in the village, dragging everyone out. 

Her heart was like a drum in her chest. 

“Give me Lyra and I will let you go free!” he shouted in the language of the Empire. 

Jyn swallowed the lump in her throat. 

“I don’t know where she is,” a man’s voice said.

Papa.

What was Papa doing there?

He was supposed to be running to meet her. 

Jyn saw Papa take a deep breath, every line in his body radiating fear. 

There was a sardonic laugh from the man in white and the horsemen pointed their spears at the rest of the village. 

“You know how to tell your stories better than you know how to lie, Galen! Give me what I want and I’ll leave you all be! You can be the lord of sheep shit and stones as much as you want, if you just  _ give it to me _ .”

“No!” someone shrieked.

Mama.

What was Mama doing there?

Mama was holding the spear tightly, the broken end clutched in her hand and the spearhead glowing in an otherworldly way. 

“Let him go, Orson,” she shouted. 

“Lyra!” the man in white said. “It’s lovely of you to join the party! You of all people would know the value of cooperation! You should tell your husband about that.”

The spearhead twitched in her hand as the rain fell. 

“You won’t take us alive,” she said, absolute surety in her voice. 

The entire world was silent, save for a handful of muffled voices from the villagers still being guarded by the horsemen. 

“Very well then,” the man in white said. “How about a demonstration of my strength.”

The horsemen held their spears ready. 

Jyn crouched lower. 

“For every minute that you don’t cooperate, Galen, ten shall die. Can you live with that on your conscience?”

Lyra swallowed deeply, holding herself firm. 

There was the loud rattle of metal behind her and Jyn shrieked, before someone picked her up like a rag doll. 

“I found the girl!” the man holding her shouted. 

“Ah!” the man in white cried. “Another guest!”

Lyra shrieked, her voice laced with sadness and terror as Jyn was brought closer to her. “Not my daughter!” she screamed, clutching Jyn tight to her as the man dropped her. 

“Do you agree then, Lyra?” 

“Don’t do this, Orson,” Galen said, the rain running down his face. 

Jyn could barely make out anything beyond the rush of blood in her ears. 

Her mother started moving backwards, the cliff growing ever closer in her field of vision. 

She clutched her mother tighter. 

Her mother whispered fiercely. “Whatever happens, Jyn, you need to have faith.”

“Faith?”

A brief moment of movement and Lyra swung out, catching her in the stomach, before grabbing her arm and shoving her back  _ hard _ .

Jyn’s stomach dropped the moment her mother backed her out further, her legs scrabbling for purchase on the ground, away from the steep drop of the cliff. 

“Mama?” she said, terror clouding her voice. 

Her hands reached up, grabbing onto the haft of the spear.

_ Hold firm, Jyn,  _ her mother had said to her in happier times. 

“What’s happening, Mama?”

Lyra ignored her and turned back to the invaders. “I give you this ultimatum!”

The soldiers turned from the villagers, training their weapons on Galen and inching their way along the cliff path. 

“I say this,” Lyra shouted, her voice strong and fierce. “Leave my people be or I shall let the bloodline die!”

_ The bloodline? _

What was the bloodline?

“Mama,” Jyn tried again, trying to draw her attention, feet still trying to find purchase on the slippery ground. 

The rain was running into her eyes and they stung, the drops warm on her cheeks. 

“Mama, please!”

“What’s to say that I won’t let it happen anyway?” the man in white said, moving ever closer, surrounded by his guards. “Who’s to say that my mission here wasn’t to destroy every inch of this place and raze the bloodline to the ground?”

The bloodline?

Jyn whimpered again, trying to grab her mother’s arm, trying to reach out, trying for  _ anything _ . 

It failed. 

Lyra’s arm was a vice. 

“Orson! This is the last warning!” she shouted. 

The ground was slipping, chunks of dirt starting to slip in the rain and slide off the side of the cliff. 

The man in white called out something indistinct. 

The rain kept falling. 

Jyn grabbed her mother’s arm.

“Have faith, my brave girl, my eagle.”

The grip on her arm loosened. 

An eagle cried above. 

A green light flickered and died in her hand. 

A girl fell. 

A woman rose. 

  
  
  
  


\---   
  
  
  
  
  


This is how our story starts proper:

A little girl lies on the banks of a river, mud in her hair and mud caking her chest, which ceased to beat a long time ago.

And then that little girl wakes up and walks the world, forever ageless from the moment she is three-and-twenty. 

Jyn clutched at her chest, trying to rummage through her memories to work out what had happened.  

How was she still alive?

What had even happened?

Her mouth was dry and she opened it, trying to catch a drop of the rain that was beginning to lighten up above her and she struggled upright for a moment, before she looked down at her hand.

The spear.

Her mother’s spear. 

It had fallen with her. 

The spear was heavy in her hand and out of the corner of her eye, Jyn could almost imagine that the green sheen of the spear had blazed into brilliant emerald flames as she had fallen - no, had she? Had she fallen? How was she still here?

Mama. 

Mama.

Mama had thrown her from the cliff’s edge.

Why?

The bloodline that she had mentioned.

Mama had been willing to kill Jyn to protect it.

What was it?

And the spear?

What did it have to do with anything?

She turned it over in her hand, the weapon revealing nothing but the sickly green sheen it had always had.  

But no.

She’d seen it burst into flames when she fell. 

That couldn’t happen. 

The spear might have been old, and it might have been special and it might have been her mother’s, but there was no way that it could set itself on fire.

But then again, people didn’t fall off the edge of a cliff and rise again, like nothing had happened. 

Could it?

The eagle settled heavily on her shoulder. 

She stroked his soft feathers, feeling the play of muscles underneath them and the strength that characterised them. 

She chucked his chin, a small smile coming across her face. 

“Guess you’re stuck with me now.”

She picked herself up and kept going, ignoring the flashing eyes that she could see peering at her from everywhere around her. 

She was an Eagle of her people and she would keep going. 

She’d seen something else as she’d fallen, though - something  _ important. _

What had she seen?

Jyn squeezed her eyes shut, trying to remember what it had been. 

It had been flashes, brief ones that confused her more than anything else. 

A city of white marble, and a man crumbling as he saw a son stalk towards him, a blade shining bright in his hand.

Another man, his eyes like dark stars, standing at the edge of a cliff, a bundle of brightly coloured flags fluttering loosely in his hand. 

A woman standing at the edge of a battlefield where no man dared to go. 

And so they had rushed on, a thousand images of a thousand-thousand’s worth of warriors, all bright and ready, their daggers held in their hands and their white cloaks draped around them.

And before them, she saw a woman.

No.

Not a woman.

A monster. 

The One That Came Before. 

Juno. 

The one that her family had bound in chains so long ago, which her mother had sworn to defend until the end of time.

She was rising. 

Jyn saw her and she shuddered, a chill coming over her at the thought of what horrors Juno would bring. 

And then she saw  _ him. _

And then she knew what it meant. 

Her path would take her through empires, through time itself, and she would be waiting for the one man, her one hope to bind Juno back and uphold her family’s duty. 

Her hand tightened around the spear and she could feel a  _ rush _ , like a cool river, moving through her and through her hand. 

The spearhead burst into flames in her hand, as green as the forests around her and she stood up straight, her mind running with a single thought, as clear as day.

_ Find the bloodline. _

_ Protect them. _

_ She is waking.  _


	2. The Master of Rome

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Roma, 1499. 
> 
> Ezio Auditore da Firenze, Mentor of the Renaissance Brotherhood.

Everything was colder in the real world, Cassian had found as he stared at the blocks in the white ceiling, trying to avoid the figments of his imagination that surrounded him.

_ We are about as real as you, you realise, Cassian _ , Lydia Frye muttered, and he almost missed what the Empire man was saying to him.

His ancestors (Hallucinations? Ghosts? What were they?) had started to appear to him soon after his arrival, after he’d been shoved into the Animus the first time and forced to walk in Altair Ibn La’Ahad’s shoes and relive his memories of the Third Crusade. 

It had only gotten worse since then. 

“Lie back, Cassian,” the man’s voice said. 

_ No, no, no, I don’t want this, I don’t want this, I - _

“Lie back, Mister Andor, or we will make you.”

He shook his head, trying to stop them, trying to will them not to delve into Ezio’s memories one more time - no, it wasn’t right -

He’d torn Ezio’s memories apart, relived the worst moments of his life and for what?

For the Empire to get their hands on an ancient artifact that could destroy the world?   


What the hell did they want with the Piece anyway?

He shook his head again, trying to clear the thoughts out, clear the detritus of the memories of Altair, of Lydia, of Connor, of all the other people he’d been in the Animus. 

_ Stay calm, Cassian,  _ he heard Altair’s voice say, as quiet as his blades had once been. 

No!

He couldn’t be calm, as he kept struggling, holding his mind together. 

“Ezio Auditore’s memories hold the secrets to the Piece of Eden. I will have the location out of you, or I will have your friends killed.”

He felt a pair of hands slam him flat on his back, yanking his legs straight, before he felt a needle slip underneath his arm, and oblivion washed over him. 

Before he slipped under, he heard the man’s voice again. “Find us the Piece, Cassian Andor.”

The world turned to white tiles that drifted away like dust in the wind and he  _ saw. _

The Roman wind was cool on his face while Ezio - no, not Ezio - his name is Cassian - wait, no, is he really - stood on the banks of the River Tiber, staring over at the brilliant white stone of the Vatican in front of him, before sprinting as hard as he could to the city.

The Cardinal, Rodrigo Borgia, would be making his way over to the Piece of Eden and the Vault any time now, and the only person left to stop him was Ezio. 

What was in the Vault that Rodrigo could have wanted so much? 

It didn’t matter.

Whatever happened, Ezio wouldn’t be fighting Rodrigo for any of what the Spaniard could want. 

He’d be fighting for his family, for Claudia, for Mario, for the family that had given so much before their deaths, not for anything like money or power, or even the Piece of Eden itself. 

The roofs of the city flew by beneath his footsteps, then the marble floors of the new Basilica and before he knew it, he was standing in front of the closed Vault door, only darkness emerging from it when he touched his hand lightly to it.

Almost as if the place had been waiting for him. 

A deep breath. 

There was a little voice in the back of his head screaming at him to not step inside, to stay back -

He ignored it and walked closer.

The passageway was dark and he followed the sound of voices deeper down in the Vault itself. 

A narrow hall lay at the base of a set of stairs, and it seemed to be lit within by an inner glow. 

How could the fire that lit this place be so small? What wa _ s the power source that lit this place _ ? It seemed to be thousands of years old, but the ground had never been worn from any sort of feet. 

What in God’s name was this place?

His feet kept moving closer and closer towards the Vault itself, where he could see a set of flickering lights. 

The hall he was in opened into a large chamber, bigger than almost anything he had seen in the city itself, rivalling the Sistine Chapel itself, but warmer, as if the walls had blood running through them. 

In the centre, he could see a large circular hole, with the Papal Staff standing straight in the middle with the Apple of Eden sitting atop it, both of them glowing with intricately carved symbols that he had never noticed beforehand, even when the Apple had been in his possession. 

He’d left them here after everything in Firenze and the Lord only knew the sort of damage that both Pieces were capable of.

Ezio could still taste the ashes of the Bonfire of the Vanities in the back of his throat and he swallowed thickly. 

He looked down at the pit itself, which itself was carved with brilliant white symbols that seemed to glow from within.

Leonardo would have loved this place. 

Who had built this?

What was here that Rodrigo Borgia had wanted to find the entrance so badly?

Something in the back of his mind started to prickle, and he could almost hear voices as he walked. 

_ The Prophet! _

_ The Prophet is here! _

_ Cassian! _

Ezio furrowed his brows. 

Who the hell was Cassian?

_ Why is this happening? _

_ The world seemed to be different from him.  _

_ What had changed? _

_ Cassian looked around, realising that he wasn’t limited to just Ezio’s point of view anymore. He could  _ feel _ Ezio there, know what he was thinking, but he was separate from him. _

_ He stepped forward, trying to work out what the hell had happened. _

Ezio walked closer to the Pit, pressing his hand to the Staff itself, watching it come alive, and light shone through it, blazing a new set of patterns across its surface and he tried to pull his hand back, trying to -

Light suddenly emitted from midair, blinding him and it formed into the shape of a woman wearing an odd shape helmet. 

_ What the actual fuck is this place, Cassian thought, looking around in fear and trying to find an escape from this waking nightmare. _

“Greetings, Prophet,” the woman said, seeming to be wearing robes that ought to have belonged in ancient Rome, rather than the Rome of 1499. “It is good that you have come. Let us see it.”

_ The Apple? _

_ How the hell does she know about the Apple? _

Ezio walked forward, plucking the Apple off its plinth atop the Staff and held it out, the little voice giggling in the back of his head. The woman’s hand reached out and held it slightly above the Apple, before glowing again. 

_ The woman’s face was emotionless and she turned away from Ezio and looked directly at Cassian. _

“We must speak, Cassian,” she said, tension lacing every word, as she  _ stared at Cassian.  _

Ezio swallowed, before forcing out the words. “Who are you?”

The woman looked back at him. “I have been called many names by your people. When I died, my name was Minerva. Before that, my names were Merva and Mera, and so on. There were others like me as well. Juno, who was also called Uni once, and Jupiter, who was once Tinia.”

_ Wait, these are the actual gods? _

_ What the fuck? _

_ Why are they talking to me? _

_ What could they want with - _

The only word that Ezio could choke out was “gods,” as the information raced through his head like a bolt of lightning, making some things clearer, but casting everything he knew into greater darkness. 

The woman simply laughed. “We were never gods, Ezio Auditore da Firenze. We are merely The Ones That Came Before.”

_ The guys who worked for the Empire had mentioned that name before. The Ones That Came Before.  _

_ Oh God, are they recording all of this?  _

The Apple blazed briefly, and another  _ hologram formed, how are they managing this? _

_ The Solar System, he thought, looking at the orbs that had formed, and at the little blue and green one hovering in the middle of the darkness.  _

“Even when we still walked the world, Cassian, your kind had difficulty knowing of our existence. We were,” she paused, as if trying to find the right word. “Simply too advanced for your time. Your minds were not ready.”

_ Minerva turned to him, her eyes sorrowful, almost hiding the glint in them. He knew that look. _

_ They wanted something from him.  _

Ezio was trying to understand what she was showing him. All of this knowledge. They had brought him here, to show him all this nonsense about him being a Prophet. 

And for what?

“None of this makes any sort of sense,” he managed, staring at the symbols that the Apple had cast into the centre of the room.

Minerva’s glare was sharp. “This is not meant for you. I do not speak  _ to _ you, I speak  _ through _ you,” she said, in a kindly voice, before turning back to Cassian. “Ezio has played his role enough, Cassian Andor. He anchored you and brought you to this place, but much later than we realised. There is not much time left and there is much for you to learn.”

Anchor?

Ezio’s eyes widened. 

He had so many questions about this, but he would wait. How did they know he would be here? How did they know of him? Who was this Cassian that she had waited to speak to?

But he could wait. 

Minerva had a message that she wanted to deliver. 

She turned to the empty space again, where he guessed that this spirit Cassian Andor was standing.

_ “Listen,” she said, before the hologram faded and her voice remained. The vision of the Solar System faded and an Egyptian painting of a man took its place.  _

_ No. _

_ It wasn’t quite right. _

_ The man was holding an Apple.  _

_ “When we were still young, Cassian, when we were still flesh, your people betrayed us. We brought you life, but you were many and both of our people craved war.  _

_ So busy were we with earthly concerns that we did not look to the heavens. But by the time we did…” _

_ The image of the man faded and the solar system image returned, but this time, the planets were bathed in fire.  _

_ “The world burned and it was reduced to ash. For forty days and forty nights, it burned, but it should have ended there. All of us should have. But we built your kind to survive, Cassian. And so it did. Humanity survived. _

_ Few were the numbers of my people, but we rebuilt and we endeavoured to ensure that it would never happen again.  _

_ But now we are dying, and it is left to you. And time is working against us.” _

_ The image faded again, and Cassian saw what looked like a Mayan temple, with a circular structure, almost like - the Pit he was standing in. _

_ “Truth turned into legend and the legends have been forgotten. What we built was misunderstood and those that we trusted to guard our greatest treasures betrayed us. But let my words bring you hope.” _

_ Cassian could see a dark forest in his image, lit only by the solitary light of what appeared to be a green flame. It was held by a woman with dark hair and fury writ plain on her face.  _

_ “You must find her. She remembers what the world has forgotten. If you can find her, and you can find the Great Temple, where we laboured and lost, then perhaps there will be a chance,” she said, her voice trailing off, before she found it again. “Guard yourself against the Empire, for there are many there that would stand in your way.” _

The image faded and Ezio was left standing in front of the glowing woman, her face sadder and more drawn than it had been only moments ago. 

“It is done. There is no more that I can do,” she said. “We are all gone from this world. It is only left to you now, Cassian.”

_ What the fuck? _

_ “Pull him out,” he could hear someone saying from outside the Animus. _

“No!” Ezio shouted as the figure of Minerva faded. “There are so many questions left!”

_ All Cassian could see was darkness and he tried to parse through the information that she had given him - _

_ “Starting re-emergence sequence, stand by -” _

The world turned to blinding white and then there was nothing left but oblivion and pain. 

He blinked, looking up into the face of Wilhuff Tarkin, whose eyes were alight with something that looked as if it belonged in a primordial pit.

“Thank you for your assistance, Mister Andor.”

A needle slid under his skin again and he fell back into the comforting black. 


	3. The Woman Out Of Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> London, 2016.
> 
> Jyn Erso, Sworn Enemy to Those That Came Before

_Tell me the story about our people again._

_My girl, we are the descendants of the people who bound the gods themselves, she could hear her mother whisper in the light of the waning moon. We bring our family’s spear with us wherever we go, so that should they ever escape, we may bind them once more._

_Will they escape?_

_They will try. For all eternity, they have fought against their bonds and it is our sacred duty to maintain them._

_What about me, Mama?_

_Oh Jyn, her mother had said, her hand cool and comforting on her brow. You will be the greatest of us, my girl, my eagle._

The night was cold and empty, nothing for miles in every direction when she woke up, her body in a cold sweat.

Jyn tossed over and ignored the coarseness of the sand under her body, before giving up the ghost and looking up at the stars over her head.

Shit.

It was still late, the stars hovering over her head.

Orion’s Belt and Altair were brilliant in the sky and she huffed a breath before grabbing her pack and heading out of the cave where she’d been hiding for the last god-knew-how-long. There was the barest prickle at the base of her neck and she shivered, picking her way down the high rocks, down towards where there was a fire and light down there.

Fire meant people.

And people meant a way to get back to whatever had just happened to the bloodline.

That feeling still hadn’t gone away.

Oh gods, what did that mean?

The last time that had happened -

No, she wasn’t going to think about that.

Keep walking, she told herself, pushing forwards.

She needed to get to the camp.

She’d neglected her duties for too long.

Her voice was croaky from disuse when she got to the camp, the people there staring at her in confusion and shock.

“Do you have a space at your fire for me?” she said, the old familiar words falling off her lips.

They still stared at her, before she racked her mind, trying to work out what she had said wrong.

One of them quickly leaned over and whispered something to another of them, the whispers echoing into the night.

The one who had spoken first nodded at an empty space on the far side of the fire and Jyn sat down gratefully, almost missing his words. “We didn’t think anyone lived up in the caves.”

What language was that?

Almost like Latin, no -

More guttural.

Harsher.

English, then.

“Do you guys know the date?” she asked, trying to get her bearings about her.

The first one still looked confused. “Why’d you need to know that for?”

She shrugged. “Gets pretty hard to keep track of the time when you live up there,” she said, with a meaningful nod to the caves that she’d just left.

There was a slow nod from him.

Another one piped up, after a brief look at a slim black device that he’d pulled out of a pocket.

“It’s the 18th of July.”

Jyn furrowed her brows. “And the year?”

“What d’you need the year for?” the one with the black device said, looking increasingly uneasy. “How long were you in the mountains.”

“Long enough.” She shrugged. “Look, I just want to check something.”

There was a long pause.

“It’s 2016, miss.”

2016?

_Oh gods._

She resisted the urge to massage her temples, or pitch herself forwards into the sands, knowing full well that neither of those options would help her at all.

She’d missed seventy years of humanity?

How the hell had that happened?

Jyn sighs deep, before painting a smile onto her face and staring back into the dying embers, hoping as though they would be able to tell her anything.

“You gentlemen wouldn’t happen to know of a way for me to get to the nearest city, would you?” she said, watching the suspicious looks remain on their faces.

The silence hung heavily over them.

One of them shrugged again, with a pointed look at the tattered contents of her bag (it had been a standard American Army issue bag when she’d first trekked into the mountains, seeking to banish the horrors she’d seen from her mind) and the threadbare state of her clothes.

“We’re going to head back off to the city tomorrow. We might have a space in the back of the truck if you’re up for it.”

Jyn smiled again, a small thing that didn’t quite reach her eyes, and relaxed her grip on her bag, while the silence fell over the campsite again.

_Oh Bel, oh Sulis, I have failed so many people in my lifetime, let me not be too late for this one._

  
  


_\---_  
  


 

By the time she had finally reached something that was worthy of calling itself a city, it was five days later and the pockets of a handful of people that she had walked past were much lighter.

There were mornings when she could barely get used to the existence of the printing press, let alone accept that humanity had finally automated a giant machine to fly and travel faster than anything she could comprehend. 

But London was still there, just as she'd remembered it - as beautiful and sore as a bruise. 

London hadn’t changed in years, the spires of the Houses of Parliament and St Paul’s still keeping watch over the city and Tower Bridge still seeming like a squat giant spanning the River. It was the same, but not quite as it had once been. Some of the stone was a little too shiny, some of the voices too loud and everywhere, she could still see the screams and terror in the skies above.

No - that wasn’t to be thought of.

For now, the sun was shining bright on the river and the city called to her, as much as it had when she had been here to guard Lydia Frye while the war outside continued to ravage Europe.

Her bag was heavy on her shoulders and the steady thud of her boots echoed down the winding streets as she followed the little voice in her head.

There was something in this city that she needed to find.

Something important.

The familiar and comforting sounds of wingbeats echoed from above her, too soft for anyone else to hear and she smiled. At least there would be one friend in the city.

Something prickled down Jyn’s spine and she twisted around, looking about her in the alleyway for any enemies there.

There was no one there.

Wait.

There!

There was a tiny flicker of shadow up there, in the flat with the closed blinds.

No.

Not in the flat.

Above.

Her sense of unease only started to grow as she climbed the wall up to where the flat was, inching the window open as silently as she could.  

There were a pair of soft male voices talking (arguing) in the apartment and she chanced a look.

There was a tiny, rickety table that was covered in maps and diagrams, and one of the men (a smaller one, his hair pulled back in a bun) leaned over the table, moving a little block closer to the other man.

“Maybe if we started the attack -”

“You would be killed within thirty seconds flat,” Jyn heard herself say, her voice almost as distant as her old home.

Both of the men looked up, shock written on their faces, before they composed themselves and suddenly reached for weapons.

She held her hands up, letting them see how harmless she was as she inched her way out the windowsill.

“Who the hell are you?” the taller one asked, his hand twitching towards a gun on the table.

Jyn kept her eyes on the bracer she was certain beneath his sleeve.

One of the major disadvantages of the passage of time was that things would get more refined and increasingly streamlined as the times changed.

And honestly, she never would have wished for those halycon days of yore where the Brotherhood gave their fingers in order to wield their blades.

The room was completely silent and her eyes adjusted to the darkness, as she stared closer at the table.

A huge cog with six spokes was stark black and white in the middle of one of the photographs and she went closer to touch it.

_The Empire._

_She knew it._

_A symbol as old as the Crusades, and even then, before it._

_What did these two want with -_

“Hey! Lady!” the first man shouted, aiming a pistol at her chest. “What the hell are you doing?”

She held up her hands again. “I’m not here to hurt you!” Jyn protested. “I’m wanting to stop the Empire as much as you do!”

“Prove it,” the blond one said.

Jyn swallowed hard, looking at the symbol tattooed into his wrist, at the stylised compass needle. “I live in the dark to serve the light. I serve the Creed and I have sworn to uphold the three tenets.”

The gun wavered slightly and she could see the eyes of the man holding it widen, before he came to a decision and lowered it.

“I didn’t realise there were many English Assassins left.”

She lowered her hands, walking to stand by the table, pursing her lips. “I’m not one.”

“Your accent isn’t British though,” the blond one spoke, narrowing his eyes. “It sounds more Gaelic than anything else. Were there even Assassins in Ireland?”

The other one looked confused and Jyn cut in, before any of them could read ulterior motives into her actions. 

“Can we do introductions at the very least?” Jyn said, injecting a little levity into her voice. “I’m Jyn Erso.”

“I’ve never heard of an Assassin by the name of Jyn Erso.”

“That’s because I’m not officially an Assassin.”

“Then who the hell are you?” the dark haired one said. “Also, I’m Bodhi, that’s Kay, ignore him when he gets weird.”

Jyn shrugged, giving Bodhi a meaningful look and letting her mask slip for a moment. Just a moment, though, it didn’t bode well to get too familiar.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realise there were other groups that opposed the Empire as well,” Kay said, his entire body sinking in a slouch that was still laced with tension. "Or at the very least, I wasn't aware that any members of them were alive to break into an apartment and randomly offer advice."

“I’m not part of any group.”

“So what, you’re a lone wolf, some sort of silent guardian that watches over the Brotherhood?”

She shrugged again. “All you need to know is that I’m not a friend of the Empire. And that I can help with what you're up to.”

Kay narrowed his eyes, but stayed slightly hunched over. “And what is it that you think that we're up to?”

A quick scan of the table.

Maps everywhere.

What looked like an electrical schematic of an Empire run building.

A photograph of Turin.

And there - _him_.

A photograph of the man that she'd been waiting for all these years.

His face stared back at her from a medical file.

A rescue.

“You're trying to break someone out.”

It wasn't a question.

Bodhi nodded, his eyes dark, and picked up the photograph of the man again. “The Empire is trying to experiment on him - we need to get him out before it goes too far.”

Jyn swallowed, trying to push back the images that she’d seen of that man, all those years ago when she’d fallen from the cliff face, of preparing the choice which was still to come.

“I can help with that,” she said with the voice of someone who had seen the gates of Auschwitz and who had withstood far greater things than the Order, with its delusions of grandeur.

“How do we know we can trust you?”

She shrugged. “You can’t. But I could have killed you all before you realised I was here, and yet, I haven’t. I think that tells you enough about what I want.”

There was a silent conversation in the looks of the two men as they glanced over at each other, seeming to come to a silent consensus.

“Well then, lady,” Bodhi said, his expression a little more open this time. “How do you propose we break into the facility? The last team that tried to do that got absolutely destroyed.”

Her eyes scanned the map.

What was there around the facility?

The flat roof.

The cliffside that the entire facility had been set into.

The road that led into and out of the facility, nominally the only way in.

Her finger rested gently on the topographic lines just to the north of the building. “What’s this?”

Kay leaned over the map, furrowing his brow. “That’s Ravello. Little town, pretty sleepy.”

Jyn shook her head. “That wasn’t what I was asking. Does it go all the way out to the cliff face?”

_The whirling rain and the mud and the -_

No. She wouldn’t think about that.

Kay looked at her, his face full of confusion. “You can’t scale your way down to the building, are you insane?”

Another shake of her head, before she felt her long-dead mother’s smirk cross her face. “Gentlemen, I am merely asking that you have _faith_.”

Faith, that ephemeral feeling of flying before gravity took over, before the ground came rushing up to meet her.

How very fitting.

Jyn swallowed hard, and pointed to the map of the town again, cocking her head, feeling her hand twitch towards her spear. “Shall we begin?”


	4. Subject 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Place Calling Itself Home, 2016.
> 
> Cassian Andor, Subject 16.

He saw her sometimes. 

The Woman, he had always called her.

The others in his head, as dramatic as they are, had a different name for her: The Eagle Bearer.

There was a reproachful comment from Ezio about calling someone dramatic, along with the words ‘pot’ and ‘kettle’ thrown in there for good measure.  

But that was beside the point, he thought, chuckling to himself. 

He was an insane man who had spent the last two years reliving the memories of his long-dead ancestors and what gets to him is the sight of a woman in their memories that never seems to age. 

But Minerva had told him to find that woman. 

Why?

But this much, at least, was true: he saw her. 

Not in his dreams or anything so cliched as that, but it was just the little things. 

The flash of bright eyes behind a fall of dark hair. 

Bruised knuckles hidden beneath a pair of worn gloves. 

The bright flare of a set of green flames. 

The thumping sound of an eagle’s wings as she rushes into battle. 

The movement of an exhausted fighter in the corner, throwing everything that they had left into the fight. 

It's those little moments that make him clutch the crystal around his neck - it’s not there anymore, he thought - it was Altair’s, it was Ezio’s, it was Bayek’s, it was Kassandra’s, it was the gift of a long-dead woman who might never have even lived, save in the mind of an insane man. Still. The thought and imagined weight of it call back those memories from Masyaf-Rome-Constantinople or a thousand other cities where it was just them at the end of all things. 

He's so tired. 

But that’s alright. 

He’s been walking this path for so long, what’s just a little more of a wait. 

Cassian Andor closed his eyes alone in a white room, the tang of copper and blood alive in the air and the whisper of the Venetian-Levantine-Roman wind rippling through the empty and dark skies as the world shifted and turned to dust around him. 

It was not Cassian Andor that opened his eyes again, but Altair Ibn La’Ahad, greatest of the Assassins, who woke to the sound of screams and the sound of gunfire outside. 

What was happening outside?

He looked down at his hand, his tanned,  _ whole _ hand, no familiar weight of a bracer or the sight of a stump at his ring finger. 

He paused for a moment in his confusion, taking stock of what lay around him in this room. 

White.

There was nothing there but stark white and sharp lines.

_ Prison _ , the broken mind of Cassian Andor supplied.  _ This is a prison. _

_ You should stay inside _ , he could hear the ghost of Ezio Auditore da Firenze whisper in his head. 

In the corner of the room, in a patch of shadows, Altair could see a flicker of movement, a hidden little thing - the flash of a woman’s bright eyes and nothing more. 

He shook his head and Cassian Andor awoke again, settling into the ruined structures of his own mind. 

He should heed their instructions and stay inside. 

But that wasn’t the path for him anymore. 

He had to wait -  _ she  _ was coming - 

He wasn’t Cassian, he wasn’t Ezio either, nor Bayek in the sands of Egypt nor Brutus, his blades glittering sharp as he waited to kill a man who would be king. 

Wait - 

He could hear a familiar voice there - 

There was a loud noise outside the door that jarred Cassian from his less-than-restful thoughts, and it was the work of a moment to tense, to feel Ezio sink into the old patterns and hold himself ready -

“Hey! It’s us!” someone whispered, their voice tight once the door fell inwards.

His face was familiar - all dark eyes and a scared face - 

Had Altair seen him once? 

No - he remembered this man. 

Bodhi.

Bodhi had come for him?

If Bodhi came for him, it meant that -

“It’s time to get going, Cassian!” Kay puffed out, his long and lanky frame barely squeezing into the tiny room. 

The rest of his escape was a blur, but he swore that he could see a flash of green flame and rapid movement, all dark hair and viciousness to rival that of an eagle -

No.

He was seeing things. 

He fell - faltered for half a moment. 

Ezio looked around before -

Cassian shoved him back, letting his mind reset into his old patterns. 

His brow furrowed as he took in the entire scene around him - complete chaos, bodies on the ground and blood on the walls. 

A woman’s eyes flashed at him before he blinked once-twice-thrice in rapid succession and the world went back to normal, where Bodhi was staring at him in abject horror.

“Who did this?” he whispered. 

He could see the fires of Masyaf and Al Mualim in Altair’s mind and -

He shook his head again. 

“What the hell were they doing to him, Kay?” he mutters. 

“The Animus,” Kay said, a line of fury in his otherwise expressionless voice. “They made the Animus. And then they shoved Cassian into it.”

There was a flicker of fire from the end of the corridor. 

_ Let me take over, _ Altair whispers in a deep recess of his tattered mind.  _ I have done this a thousand times before, novice.  _

_ No _ , he shouted with every fibre in his body.  _ My mind is my own! _

He closed his eyes tightly, pressing his hands against - his hands weren’t bound, why - what was going on, was this a trap. 

_ Stay calm, brother _ , Ezio whispers, his voice as soft as a Florentine breeze. 

“Right then, Cassian,” Kay says, his voice tense and his face hard. “Time for plan two.”

The needle slid in smoothly and -

Subject 16 opened his eyes and the world was black around him and the feeling of the road was jarring as the car seemed to go over fifty speed bumps in rapid succession.

“Sorry!” Kay yelled from the front seat. “Italian cops are insane! Just hold on -”

“He’s crashing!” Bodhi whisper-shouted, his voice tense with fear. 

_ Italy?  _ He thought to himself, trying to keep himself strong - it was so much effort to keep going, and he couldn’t breathe and he’s in -

Lydia Frye opened her eyes, keeping herself calm in this metal coffin that she was now in. It was nothing compared to what the trenches at Verdun once were, but to see the Angel herself in the car -

Cassian Andor woke up again, wresting control of his mind, and just lay back.  

There was nothing left for him but to just sit and wait. 

He could be certain that Kay and Bodhi were frantically talking to each other in the front seat, trying to work out what the hell had happened to him while the Empire had him under their control, but he blocked it all out.  

But it was nice, not being in the sterile white room, with nothing to look at but the blurs that his mind kept conjuring up. 

Almost eerily so, after he had spent so much time with the voices of dead men and women in his head. 

But it's nice. 

Strange, but nice. 

It didn’t stop the visions or the feeling of that  _ itch _ under his skin or the sensation of the pen sliding through -

It was going to be alright. 

He could keep going. 

He ignored the prickling thought that if he looks into the white building blocks above his head that his confused mind keeps painting there, he'll see  _ her _ eyes up there. 

Wait, he's not in the White Room anymore. 

He's free. 

But is he?

It's quiet and he settles down to wait. 

His eyes adjusted to the quiet and soft darkness after some time and he was relieved that the world hadn’t been thrown into the sharp contrast of red and gold (although there was less and less of that with every passing day), but it was an uncomfortable thing, to be torn so sharply from his vision.

The voices of centuries past whispered in the quiet darkness and he settled in, trying to ignore what  _ she _ had showed him.

Not the woman. 

The other one. 

The one that was something more.

He shuddered at the thought of the world engulfed in flames, only a few figures, seeming to be made of clay, rising from the ashes. 

But it was alright.

He had heard her voice every day for years (every hour, minute - make it stop, makeitstop) and he managed to get through it. 

He just needed to keep going for a little longer. 

His breaths grew deeper, before he could feel it, beneath his body, while the car came to a quiet halt and a flicker of light burst in through the open trunk.

He covered his eyes, the world too bright for him and too loud -

_ Stay quiet, novice!  _ Altair shouted, his rage blazing with the fires of a thousand burning cities while Cassian raised his hand and readied himself to attack whoever had -

Bodhi looked down at him, his face still that mask of pity and fear that he had worn through the entire escape. 

“You alright or you want another dose, Cassian?”

He shook his head, not quite ready for words just yet. 

“It’s going to be rough,” a woman’s voice said, her voice a mixture of sadness and hope. “Waking up isn’t going to be easy.”

Cassian shook his head. 

He’d seen her before.

No.

No.

He hadn’t seen her.

But  _ they  _ had. 

He shook his head again, letting the Eagle of his vision take over, casting the world into gold and red, only to -

She was bright.

Brighter than almost anything he’d ever seen before, stardust in her eyes and in her body and Cassian covered his eyes, before Altair Ibn La’Ahad stood up from the cramped trunk and stared the Eagle Bearer down in all her glory.

She waved a hand at him, her other resting on the hilt of a spear (a  _ spear _ , Altair spat.  _ Those weapons had been outdated even by the time of the Crusades _ ) at her hip, before stepping closer -

“Take another step and I will tear your throat out,” he said, cocking his head and letting his voice deepen, giving her a hint of what he was capable of, his wrist instinctively flicking out to release a Hidden Blade that was no longer there. 

Her face was dark and angry, almost as much as it had been the night that Acre had  _ burned _ . 

“Stand down, boy,” she growled out, her hand tightening on the spear. “You’re not a novice anymore and I don’t appreciate you borrowing that man’s body.”

“And I don’t understand how a long-dead woman has returned from the grave to somehow decide that she requires my kinsman -”

Cassian Andor shoved the other whispers in his head down and stared at the woman who’d driven half his ancestors mad, before leaning back on the car, not trusting his shaking legs. “How the hell are you here?” he croaked out. “I saw you.”

His hand waved at the figures that only he could see, trying to show her what he meant. “I saw you in all their memories. How - what - why are you here?”

She shrugged, before sticking out her hand, promptly withdrawing it when she realised that he wouldn’t be shaking it. Her smile was almost like that of a wolf - deadly and quiet, as she leaned back. 

The rest of the world melted away and he could feel a clarity in his thoughts as every single one of them focused on the woman in front of him. 

“I have as much right to be here as any of you. But for you, Cassian, a piece of knowledge, given for free.” There was a moment of silence, before she spoke again. “My name is Jyn Erso,” she said in an indistinct accent, her voice heavy with the weight and exhaustion of a thousand generations. 

An eagle cried high overhead and Cassian felt a shiver move down his spine. 

The war was coming.


	5. The Huntress of Monteriggioni

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Monteriggioni, 2016.
> 
> Jyn Erso, the Eagle Bearer.

There were few things that Jyn loved more than heights. 

A bit of a strange thing, given how she had wound up here, falling from such a great height, but there was something absolutely liberating about it, to know that there was nothing keeping a person from falling but a handful of steps. 

And then when you did -

Well.

No wonder the Brotherhood called it a Leap of Faith.

Which was precisely how they had managed to get into the facility, Bodhi and Kay far less capable of the Leap than she would have thought, but again: times had changed. 

It was less important to be a person capable of dealing death by the dozen, when you were fighting against someone who could ensure an entire country’s destruction with nothing more than the flick of a finger. 

But they had managed to get in, at the very least, and Jyn  _ had _ held off the Empire’s men as long as it had taken the other two to find  _ him _ (Cassian, she must remember to call him Cassian) and get him out in one piece.

Or at least, physically in one piece. 

Mentally, that was a whole different experience. 

He hadn’t spoken a word to her since they’d reached Monteriggioni, and iven how Bodhi and Kay spoke of him  _ before _ , this man seemed like a completely different person to the one who’d been taken in the first place. 

Jyn’s footsteps were silent, before she knocked on the flimsy excuse for a door at Kay’s work area. 

Kay looked over at the video feed from the camera that they had silently set up in Cassian’s room to monitor him, before shaking his head slightly. 

“Is something wrong, Kay?” Jyn asked, coming up behind him to look at the bank of computer screens - such an odd sight to see modern technology in what had once been Ezio Auditore’s pride and joy. It was almost as jarring as seeing the entire Villa in ruins, giant gaps left in the ramparts from the chaos of the Siege, the tunnels collapsed and the entire Villa stripped bare of everything that Ezio had brought back from his adventures. 

She sighed.

At least the Sanctuary was intact. 

Not that it didn't make it any less uncomfortable to be confronted with the statues of the Assassins that she had guided through their adventures, staring down at her and reminding her of her failure to protect the last of their bloodline.

There was a clicking of keys. 

Jyn flicked her eyes up, looking at where Kay raised an eyebrow at her. "Distracted, much?"

She gave him a sheepish smile. "What were you saying again?"

Kay shook his head again, before changing screens and going back to his research. 

“I heard Cassian speaking to someone called Altair,” Jyn said, trying to probe into this issue a little more, in her standard manner. By which she meant, pulling out her spear and charging at it with all her strength. 

Kay jerked around from the computer screen to stare flatly at her. “There is no one in Monteriggioni except us. You, of all people, should know this.”

“I know that,” she said patiently, trying to hold back her worry and her anger. That wouldn’t help anyone right now. “I don’t know anyone called Altair, save for  _ the _ Altair, from the Third Crusade.”

“So you think that he’s speaking with the greatest master of the Assassins, who died centuries ago?” he said, his voice just dripping with cynicism.

Jyn had never known him as the Assassin Mentor, though.

That was one of the greatest disadvantages of her life. 

She moved in and out of people’s lives as she felt, not really sticking around long enough to see them grow old and die. 

But Altair had been a great man, when she’d still known him, an impetuous youth working his way back up the ranks after breaking the Creed. 

And Bel only knew how much she remembered him. 

The cocky young Assassin from Masyaf with eyes like dark stars who had looked down his nose at everyone, but who had been faster than an eagle and as vicious as herself when it came to dealing death.

Gods above, she missed him. 

The banquet of Abu’l Nuquod still rang in her ears, the screams, and the gurgling sounds that they had all made on the ground while Altair stormed the palace, and the flames at Masyaf, and the hundreds of other fights that she’d foolishly followed him into, all in the name of protecting the Bloodline. 

Which begged the question.

How the hell would Cassian be able to speak to anyone called Altair?

And more importantly, she’d  _ seen _ Altair’s body at Masyaf.

There was no way that he could be anything like her. 

How the hell did Cassian do it?

Kay bit his lip, the silence settling awkwardly around them while Jyn rummaged through her own history to find the answer. 

“I designed it,” he finally said, his voice soft, as if he was hesitant to admit it, even to himself. 

“Designed what?”

“The Animus.”

Jyn furrowed her brow, trying to remember that word. “The machine -,” she said, waving her hand, to which he nodded. 

“The machine that the Empire forced my friend into? Yes, the very same one. You can judge me all you want for it,” he said. He pursed his lips, before continuing on. “But yes, it was supposed to be a theoretical proposal.”

“What does it do?”

He shrugged. “It was supposed to be a way to look at genetic memories - you know, relive the memories of your ancestors, and all that.”

“But -,”

“Instead, the Empire built it, and proceeded to force every Assassin that they found into it to look for -”

“The Pieces of Eden.”

Kay looked at her sideways. “You know, it’s that sort of thing that doesn’t really make me trust you. The fact that you seem to know everything about the Order and what they’re after.”

“I’m not concerned about your trust,” she said, narrowing her eyes at the video feed of Cassian’s room. “I’m concerned about what happened to him.”

There were a set of shuffling footsteps from outside. “It’s called the Bleeding Effect.”

She cocked her head. “The Bleeding Effect?” she said, letting the unfamiliar words sit on her tongue. 

“The main side effect of the Animus,” Bodhi filled in. “You go bonkers and start to forget who you are, and you start merging personalities and skills with your ancestors if you spend too long in there.”

Jyn’s eyes focused on the video feed again, as Cassian walked out of the room, presumably to somewhere else within the ruined Villa. 

“It’s a terrible thing that happened to him,” she murmured, staring at the empty image of the empty room. 

Which of his ancestors had he seen?

Was that why he had recognised her when she saw him?

And the  _ way _ that he had spoken to her. 

It smacked completely of Altair and how arrogant the bastard could have been whenever he felt the need to be. 

She bit her lip, wondering if it would be worth it to go talk to him. 

Where would he be?

Her knowledge of Ezio’s villa flashed back into her mind before she realised it.

He’d be as high as he could, at once removed and still part of the world. 


	6. The Eagle of Masyaf

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Monteriggioni, 1499/2016.
> 
> Cassian Andor, madman and The Prophet.

Cassian spent most of his time at the hideout on the rooftop using his Eagle Vision, letting the world be cast into shadowy grey, with bright flashes of red and gold, without having to see the sight of people in white robes in the corner of his vision.

Never mind the fact that whenever he saw Ezio or Altair or Lydia or any of the other people taking up space in his head, they were as solid as anyone else in this ruined city.

It was easy to pretend down there, in the Villa itself, when Bodhi and Kay looked over him with concern and Jyn stalked off with an angry expression on her face every few days, a ragged khaki rucksack on her shoulder, even though she would return without fail. He ignored the way that they all looked at him as if he were made of glass, and ignored the long scars twisting their way down his wrists and the way his eyes constantly flickered to the exits that only he could know existed.

 _Monteriggioni_ , Ezio supplied. _This is Monteriggioni, the Villa Auditore, my old home. It’s changed much since the last time I was here. It’s still the same at heart though, if we are to speak the truth, fratello mio._

He ignored the brief flicker of memory, the one that said that Monteriggioni had never truly been Ezio’s home, and that the breeze off the Arno, the distant sensation of Cristina Vespucci’s kiss and the scaffold were all that he remembered of his true home.

Cassian could never truly block out the way that Ezio had shouted as he saw the trapdoor open and the nooses tighten or the anguish that he had felt in Ezio’s mind at that very moment.

He didn’t want to delve into another dead man’s memories again.

He didn’t.

But they had no other choices, or at the very least, Kay had said.

 _Cassian, you don’t have to make the choice now_ , Ezio said. _You’re luckier than the rest of us. You still can make choices about whether you want to look further back in the past than_ she _remembers._

He shook his head again, looking down at his ragged boots, such a contrast to the vibrancy of Monteriggioni’s ruins.

But that was neither here nor there.  

It was eerie to be back here - wait, no, Cassian Andor had never been to Monteriggioni before - every time he looked, he thinks that he can see Claudia bent over her accounting books, Uncle Mario saddling a horse for yet another adventure or Ezio on the rooftops, learning to run while hunting down eagle feathers in Petrucchio’s name. It was harder and harder to keep everything separate, when he’s an outsider in this place.

Like Cassian didn’t already know that with every step he took here, feeling as if he was stepping over someone’s graves whenever he felt the crunch of broken shingles beneath his boots - no, not shingles - they’re from when Leonardo broke all the plates in the Villa - no, he shouldn’t know this - _fallo smettere, fratello mio -_

But Jyn - she was still as bright as she had been when he had first seen her in the Empire Labs.

She hadn’t spoken much on the ride there.

 _That’s a little far from what I remember of her,_ Altair said. Cassian could see someone like him walking behind him and sitting down, and he felt the weight of his hand, with the stump of his ring finger, rest on his shoulder. He ignored the way that his hallucinations seemed to be a thousand times more concrete than his reality. _When I knew her, she seemed like a normal woman, albeit a thousand times more deadly. She was never this quiet._

Lydia Frye shrugged from next to him. _She barely spoke when I knew her,_ she said, her voice soft and slow, as if she was trying to soothe him. _Do not be so harsh to judge her - she has seen far too much, if she really is the person that I remember._

An image - no, it was more of an impression than anything else - of mud and blood and terror flashed briefly through his mind, and he saw Lydia nod in sympathy.

_Indeed so. She was there with me at Verdun._

Cassian licked his lips, trying to work out how to phrase his question. “How,” he started, his voice catching slightly, before he decided to take a different tack. “How did you know her?”

 _Who are you asking, Cassian_? Lydia asked.

He shrugged, and paused a moment, trying to explain his muddled thoughts. “I don’t know how to explain this. An immortal woman who appears in all of my ancestors’ memories?”

Altair snorted, toying with the strap of his bracer. _Stranger things have happened before. And besides, when I knew her, she was able to turn the tide at Hattin._

 _Hattin?_ Ezio asked. _I heard Uncle Mario tell legends of that._

“That’s not the question I was asking,” Cassian said, resting his head in his hands and massaging, trying to fight back the headaches he’d had ever since he’d been shoved into the Animus. “I was asking how the hell you all know the same woman who is downstairs now and what she wants with _me_.”

“I know them because your family has always been a group of insane people who prefer to jump off buildings before thinking,” came a soft voice behind him, the heavy thud of boots echoing over the empty skyline of Monteriggioni.

He twisted in his seat, his body tense and he could feel his hand twitch for a gun that wasn’t there anymore.

“Is anyone sitting there?” she asked, gesturing to an empty patch of rooftop, while his ancestors formed a phalanx around him, a group of silent guardians.

He shook his head mutely.

Jyn sat down, dangling her feet off the edge of the roof and picked at a handful of loose threads in her trousers.

Cassian appreciated it.

If she had truly been the person that his ancestors remembered, then it would have meant nothing for her to play the nonchalant warrior and apparently immortal woman. But instead, she was here, awkward and uncertain.

She took a slow breath in, looking as if she was trying to say something but didn’t quite have the words for it. “I heard what they did to you there.”

He shrugged. “I survived it, didn't I?”

“It's not enough to have only survived, Cassian. You deserved better than that.”

His voice was contemptuous. “How do you know that? The things that I did - Montreal, St Petersburg -”

She shrugged, her voice deceptively light. “I know about the Bleeding Effect.” There was a pause and it seemed to echo with the sins of the past. “Whatever horrors you have seen or done, I guarantee that I have done far worse.”

He clutched at his head, as Lydia placed her hand on his shoulder. _Let me take over, Cassian._

He shook his head as Jyn looked over at him in alarm. “No. You don't get to just take over.”

_You are not alone, Cassian. Whatever choice you make, you won't be alone._

“Who are you talking to, Cassian?” Jyn’s face was drawn and sharp.

Like an eagle, he thought.

He shook his head. “You wouldn’t even believe me if I started.”

A shrug. “You know, the things that I’ve seen? Something I realised a long time ago is that history might remember Prophets as divinely inspired, but most people at the time just called them mad.”

_The Prophet! The Prophet is here!_

He’d never be able to get the cries of the Apple out of his head again.

He shook his head again, trying to put on the mask of Cassian Andor, Assassin of the Brotherhood - the man that he’d once been. “Meet many prophets in your time?”

Another shrug. “Enough.”

There was a pause, before it was broken by a slight chuckle and he turned to see her lips turn upwards into a smile. “I remember John of Patmos, though. He was deeply fond of that still he owned. Made some really good raki with it, as well.”

John of Patmos?

As in _St John of Patmos_?

As in, the man who had written the Book of Revelations?

The thoughts must have been written plain on his face because Jyn turned fully towards him and sighed deeply. “You know, all that talk about the Bleeding Effect, I didn’t really believe it.”

“And you do now?” he said, with an uncharacteristic snappishness. “Now that you’ve seen the insane man in all his glory?”

Another sigh. “I’ve seen things like you wouldn’t believe. It’s not my place to dismiss it,” she said, her voice empty. “But if you’re here, and if you’ve heard the message -”

“You knew what Minerva’s message was?”

Ezio’s voice was patient in his ear. _I found her. I wanted to find what she meant to Minerva that you had been told to find her._

Jyn shrugged. “I’ve seen things that you wouldn’t believe. Minerva’s message wasn’t one of them - it was meant for you alone.”

“Then why are you here?”

There was no response.

“I’ve always loved this place, you know. It’s always been so beautiful. Like it just brims over with _love._ ”

He turned to Jyn again, where she was idly kicking her legs over the ledge of the Villa’s roof, her actions those of a child but her face that of an exhausted adult, a startling display of innocence and jaded wisdom.

“I want some answers from you - why did Minerva -,”

“There’ll be time for that, Cassian. But you deserve a moment of peace before all of this comes crashing down on your ears.”

“But -,”

“Look at the sky, Cassian. You deserve better than what’s to come. And I can’t give you peace with what’s to come, but I can at least give you a moment _now_ ,” she said, her voice heavy.

Cassian felt a slight weight lift as he looked over at the olive vines that surrounded the mount of Monteriggioni, while Ezio and Altair quietly started to bicker about fighting styles behind him. All the vines that Uncle Mario had planted himself with Ezio during that boiling hot summer, and all the buildings that Claudia badgered Ugo into funding and -

It struck him then.

He felt at peace.

Not sane, he’d never truly be that, but he was at peace.

For as long as it would last.

And when it came, he’d be ready for it.


	7. The Last King of Rome

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Roma, The Ides of March, 44BC/2016
> 
> Jyn Erso, killer of the Last King in Rome

_The city was absolutely silent, the emptiness on the streets absolutely haunting._

_Roma should never have been this quiet._

_Jyn swallowed deeply, letting her power wash through her body, down her arm and into the spear._

_A burst of brilliant green flame emerged from her spear._

_Her footsteps echoed down the empty avenues, the brick insulae of the city giving way to the bright marble facades of the Forum._

_Shit, where was Brutus?_

_Her hand tightened for a moment, before she heard the rustle of cloth and the panting of a man coming towards her._

_“Oh thank the Gods, Eagle Bearer,” he puffed out._

_She could see the bright sheen of a blade tucked into the folds of his toga and her face grew hard._

_“Are you certain?”_

_A sharp nod. “He’s close to finding it. If we wait any longer, his armies will march on the Key.”_

_A deep inhale._

_Shit, they’d been so close to stopping him._

_If he got the Key -_

_Well, enough blood had been spilled in its name._

_And it wasn't the right time, nor was Caesar the right man to use it._

_Her voice was as sharp and brittle as flint. “I can do it if you cannot.”_

_Brutus shook his head. “It is my duty.”_

_Her hand tightened and she could see her knuckles whiten. “You would unleash a war on the Republic to prevent the loss of a Key?”_

_He looked absolutely torn and his perfect patrician posture sagged for a moment, the mask stripped away to reveal the frightened man. “Caesar, he -,” he started before he tried again. “He has the Staff. If he can find the Key -”_

_It lasted half a moment before the brief moment of panic fell away and his poise slid over him again and he became the ideal Roman again, so firm and so unyielding that he might have arranged his robes and gone to stand on a plinth in the Forum as a marble figure._

_Jyn nodded._

_There wasn't going to be anything else she could do._

_She pulled a fold of toga over her head, widening her stance as she followed Brutus into the Theatre of Pompey._

_The murmurs of anticipation abruptly stopped with his sharp entrance._

_Caesar turned to him, his face full of confusion and suspicion._

_Brutus walked up to him, his right hand reaching into his robes._

_The diadem on Caesar's brow sparkled in the dim light._

_The entire theatre went still._

_Jyn’s hand was white with stress on the haft of her spear._

_Brutus’s head lowered to whisper something to Caesar, his free hand grabbing his toga._

_His hand yanked hard on the toga._

_Caesar was thrown off balance, his hand coming out to steady himself and -_

_A moment passed._

_Brutus’s arm swung upwards and down._

_A spray of brilliant arterial red washed over the crisp white toga._

_“In the name of Rome and the Republic!” came the shout._

_A huge uproar started behind them and a group of men descended on Caesar, the great dictator brought low as the mob fell on him._

_Jyn stood back, holding her spear openly now, trying to avoid the thought of what Brutus had just unleashed in the name of the Brotherhood._

_The carnage had stopped by now, and she went over to where Caesar lay in a pool of his own blood, still yet breathing._

_Brutus was crouched over him._

_“Why do this, my son?” he gurgled in mangled Greek before he took a shivering breath and stared at Jyn._

_Wait, son?_

_It didn't matter anymore. Caesar was dead._

_“It is over for you now,” she said, placing the tip of her spear at his throat before she shoved, his breath ceasing. “Requiescat in pace, Gaius Julius Caesar. May the Gods protect us from what you have unleashed.”_

_A feather appeared between her fingers and she ran it through the blood that still oozed from Caesar’s wounds._

_She took a deep breath, lowering the fold of toga from her head, before looking at Brutus, whose face was the colour of curdled milk and whose eyes were wide._

_“Are you alright?”_

_It wasn't a question._

_Brutus was clearly the farthest thing from “alright” at the moment._

_She touched his shoulder lightly and he flinched._

_“The others,” he managed to stammer out. “Where are they?”_

_She shrugged, avoiding the sight of the white body and the smears of blood all over the marble floors. “They went out to the Rostra to announce the death. You should go out soon if we're to have a hope of hiding the Brotherhood’s involvement.”_

_He said nothing, just stared at the body before he took a breath in, squaring his shoulders._

_“Remember this moment, mistios. The Brotherhood will always protect its own should you ever need it.”_

_Jyn pulled the white toga fold over her head again, pushing her way through the Roman mob like a silent white shadow._

_Everywhere she looked, she could see people clamouring to reach the Rostra where Brutus was straining to make himself heard._

_Oh Gods protect him._

_Her body moved by instinct as she started to climb up the rickety structures of a nearby insula, trying to see over the heads of the crowd._

_Shit, that was a lot of people._

_She swallowed hard and tried to push away what she remembered of Antony, the probable heir to this chaotic mess._

_A drunkard and a wastrel of a military commander who would plunge the Republic into another civil war._

_Shit._

_She needed to go to Egypt and try and stop them before the war starved the entire Republic._

_She shook her head._

_Whatever happened now, it would happen._

_Brutus would lose._

_Deep in her heart, she knew this would be the case - she’d still protect what was left of the bloodline, but there was a war coming, and it would only end when a man with a bigger army came to scoop up what was left._

_She would have to let it happen or the Imperials would find out why she had been involved with Caesar's death and they would be led straight to the Key._

_She let out another sigh and turned back to that seething mass of humanity._

_Jyn Erso stopped at the edge of Trastevere, looking over the wood and bricks of Rome, before raising a hand._

_“Ave atque vale, Marcus Junius Brutus.”_

  
  
  
  


\----

  
  
  
  


Jyn Erso would forever be the one who lived in the dark to serve the light.

_Habitamus, mistios, in servitium -_

There was a flicker of light and Jyn raised her head, suddenly brought back to the present, her legs stiff from sitting on the floor of the old Sanctuary.

It took a moment, but she found herself staring at Cassian’s sleeping form on the flickering screen of Kay’s monitor, biting her lip, while the great statues that Ezio had spent so much commissioning stared down at them.

“Do you think it’ll work, Kay?” she said, flexing her hand and clenching it again, ignoring the sharp gaze of Amunet in the corner.

Kay didn’t look away from the monitor and the jury-rigged electronics that surrounded them, as he hissed in a brief moment of pain from a sharp wire. Bodhi snored from a cot nearby and she tuned him out, as she listened to Kay grumbling to himself again. “This stupid fucking Animus. Build a new one, they said -”

Jyn sighed, and held up a pair of wires for Kay’s perusal. “You need the red one or the blue one.”

He rolled his eyes. “I don’t give a shit. The one that’s more intact, please. And as for this, well, you said it yourself - we need to find this Temple.”

“We have no choice.”

“Do you think it’ll make him worse? I spoke -”

His voice was terse. “I _know_ it’ll make him worse, but we have no better options as of this moment.”

“He deserves a choice.”

Kay leaned back. “Look, lady. I don’t care who you are and why you’re so concerned about the wellbeing of Cassian Andor. But get this, please. I owe him my life and my freedom. Anything beyond that is purely negotiable. Screwdriver number three, please.”

There was an awkward pause, where Jyn nodded, taking a deep breath and helped her reluctant ally build a machine to drive an insane man even further down the rabbit hole.

Something clicked in her head, and Jyn turned to stare at him.

“What’d you mean by the fact that you owe him your life?” she said, cocking her head.

Kay raised an eyebrow and conspicuously started linking two of the wires together. “That’s a story that I’d need to be pretty damn drunk to tell you.”

“Can I hold you to that?”

A shrug. “Depends if we get out of this alive or not.”

Jyn sighed again. “I wouldn’t be so sure about our survival.”

A narrowing of Kay’s eyes.

“What Cassian said about the message he’d been sent?” she said, noting the flicker of recognition on Kay’s face. “I wouldn’t trust Minerva.”

“You have a reason for that? Pass those wires over there, please.”

A shrug. “That much effort and they don’t tell us _where_ the Grand Temple is located?”

There was a pause, broken only by Bodhi’s deep sleep.

“I thought that was your job.”

"It doesn't matter. She wants something out of Cassian."

Kay’s laugh was bitter and full of repressed memories. "We all want something out of him."

A shake of her head. “Not like this. But I know where it is. And more importantly, I know who else knew about it and I know that she hid a Key to it somewhere around the Mediterranean. Greece, I think. Thera, I was told. Hence,” she waved at the detritus around them.

Kay lowered his head to peer at a hand-drawn diagram in his lap and Jyn turned back to sorting through the wires they had raided out of the van.

“I don’t like you.” His voice was curt. “But Cassian said that someone gave him a message that you were the only one who could guide him.”

She smirked, a little thing that she remembered from her days in Venezia following a brand new Assassin around on his quest for vengeance. “You’ve got no other choice but to follow me, though.”

Brutus’s words still rang true in her ears as she kept building their gateway down the Rabbit Hole.

_Habitamus, mistios, servire in lucem tenebris._

Remember, we live in the dark to serve the light.

The things that they would forever sacrifice to protect a world that would never know of them.

Her eyes flicked to the computer screen again.

The night went on and Cassian slept, unheeding of the torture that was to come.


	8. Daughter of Sparta

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Monteriggioni/Sparta, 2016/430BC.
> 
> Cassian Andor/Kassandra of Sparta, the Man with No Name.

Even Cassian could tell that he was barely holding it together when he woke up in the morning, his eyes blurring over and all his limbs weak while he struggled out of his rickety cot. 

A hand rubbed over his face. 

The bright shard of mirror on the wall sparkled in the light as his eyes clouded over again.

A series of blinks to clear his eyes and try and restore it.

Wait.

Something was odd about this.

He couldn’t hear anything inside his head.

He shook his head again, trying to get the hallucinations back, feeling empty without the sight of his ancestors near him. 

It still didn’t get better. 

He rested his hand against the cold stone wall, half expecting to see the old embroidered hangings there. 

There was a flicker of light from nowhere and he could hear  _ everything _ again, the memories bleeding into one another. 

He had to go upstairs, Claudia was waiting to go through the accounts with him and the Apple had been -

No.

No, Lydia was standing on the edge of the trenches, the men laughing and calling her ‘sir’ as a joke while she stared at the barbed wire and mines of No Man’s Land. 

No.

Altair Ibn La’Ahad looked over at the Eagle Bearer next to him as she adjusted her helm and shield, ensuring that her face was -

No. 

He had to get the timelines straight. 

His hand was sweating against the stones of Monteriggioni’s Sanctuary while he stared into the mirror shard, seeing a pair of eyes like dark stars and a scar through his top lip.

_ Relax, brother. It will get easier,  _ he could hear Altair.

But he can’t see him.

Where was he?

Where were they?

Why couldn’t he see them anymore?

The world swam before his eyes. 

There’s a commotion from the end of the corridor. 

He shook his head and stared back at the mirror, to where a single dark eye stared at him.

No.

It wasn’t there anymore. 

His hand instinctively tensed, expecting a knife to slide out from a bracer that wasn’t there. 

_ The Prophet is here!  _ Something in the back of his mind cried out. 

He saw Juno in the back of his mind again, offering to show him.

_ The sun burned away to dust and the pain shot up his arm and it hurt so much and - _

The rotted wood of the door splintered as someone shoved it open.

“Cassian?” a blonde man said. 

He looked familiar.

Subject 16 stared at the woman standing just beyond his shoulder, her robes seeming to move in an invisible breeze, her face covered and a hint of a horrific scar peeping out beneath it. 

Her lips were moving in an old refrain.

_ You will have to choose when the time comes, Cassian. _

_ It will be you that opens the Eye.  _

_ Take my hand and I will end it all for you.  _

Another shake of the head.  

“Cassian?” the man said again, his face falling with worry. 

Who was this man?

A slight flicker of recognition.

_ His shoulder bumped into a man in the grocery store, his hand retracting the needle that had just injected him with a heavy dose of benzodiazepines. _

_ His weight was heavy in his arms and - _

“Kay?” he said, a slight Arabic tinge to his words. 

Even to his own ears, his voice was scratchy and overly loud in the silent surroundings. 

A sharp nod. “We’ve cobbled an Animus together, but you’ll have to get into it in the van.”

Cassian pressed the heel of his hand into his forehead, trying to banish the ghosts everywhere around him. 

“The Animus. You built it?”

Kay’s voice sounded tight. “I built it.”

A nod, before the world spun around him and he dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, trying to block her out. 

_ Cassian, time is running out.  _

_ You have to make a choice. _

“Why’d you do it?” 

“What?”

It took a moment to sift through the memory of half a hundred people and -

“The Animus. Why’d you do it?” he said, trying to wall off the tsunami of memories. 

Kay’s eyes flickered towards the door. “This isn’t the time -”   


“Why’d you do it, Kay? I need to know.” Even to himself, he knew how pitiful he sounded. 

_ Cassian, this can wait for another moment,  _ Lydia snarled.  _ We have to get out of here before the Templars track us.  _

He shoved the voice down, avoiding her gaze from across the room. “I need to know, Kay. I have to know -”

_ You will have to make a choice,  _ the shade of Juno whispered again, handing the pen to him again, letting it slide through his -

“I built it because I thought it was an intellectual exercise,” Kay snapped. “We’re running out of time now, Cassian. We have to -”

“You did this -”

“Look, we don’t have time for this -”

“You wanted me to go back into it?”

A solemn nod.

“I’m not doing it, Kay.”

Altair’s hand was heavy on his shoulder. 

“You were my closest friend, Cassian,” Kay snarled. “Don’t think I don’t remember that. I owe you my life. But there’s something greater at stake here. And we need you to find something before the Templars -,”

He closed his eyes, trying to hone in on that scrap of memory. “The Key. We have to find it. We have to find it before  _ she _ does.”

Kay seemed perturbed at the mention of this mysterious woman, but he kept forging onwards.

“Jyn said that she knows the location of the Grand Temple. I don’t like her, but we’ve got no other choice. And we’re going to have to unlock it at some point. You ready?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Cassian, we don’t have another choice. Either we do it or -”

He shook his head. “She knows. She knows where the Key is.”

“Who knows?”

_ You have to stay calm, brother,  _ Ezio said.  _ Either you calm down or I’m going to take over.  _

Brutus’s voice was as angry and as low as it had been when he’d killed Caesar. He’d only appeared to him recently, his face as hard and as sharp as his dagger, and his eyes always fixed on Jyn.  _ The Brotherhood has always served a cause greater than itself. I destroyed the Roman Empire to protect it from a tyrant. You have to  _ **_keep going_ ** _ , Cassian Andor.  _

The silence of Monteriggioni washed around them, broken only by the patter of rain on the roof distantly above. Cassian’s breaths were ragged as he tried to decide the path to come. 

He didn’t need to speak.

A nod was all he needed. 

A moment, and he was lying back on an uncomfortable pallet bed, a needle slipping under the skin of his arm, while Jyn looked over him, smoothing his hair down. 

“We’ll get you to the Grand Temple, but you’ll have to find the Key for us.”

The world went black, before it shifted quickly, turning to white tiles that flew away in the Mediterranean breeze, an eagle cresting on the winds before -

  
  
  
  


\---   
  
  


 

 

Kassandra of Sparta opened her eyes, taking a moment to brace herself before taking up her sword and wiping her forehead as a commotion started in the vineyards below her. 

She sighed deeply, hoping to all the Gods above that it wasn’t the Cyclops again. Could he not find someone else on Kephallonia to annoy?

More importantly, why the fuck were there any people on Kephallonia anyway? 

Sure, the island was duller than an inbred Athenian that had been bashed repeatedly over the head, but that was part of the charm. 

Kassandra shoved the memories of Mount Taygetos down again and looked down into the vineyard, trying to work out who the hell was trying to get her attention.

If it was the Cyclops again, she was going to take his false eye and shove it up the ass of a goat. 

Her hand clenched, before she forced herself to relax, touching the warm crystal of her necklace, before rushing down the rickety stairs of her house. 

“Excuse me, is this the house of the  _ mistios _ ?” 

Who the hell was that?

She let her arm hang loosely at her side, deceptively relaxed even as every muscle in her body told her to strike him down -

“Kassandra of Sparta, I’d like to have a word with you,” he said calmly. 

Her eyes grazed his body, taking in as much as she could - well dressed, but he didn’t seem to wear it comfortably, as it he would be more comfortable in a tunic and in the fields.

He raised an eyebrow at her sharp look and her spine prickled. 

No.

This man wouldn’t be a farmer.

Not quite that.

His hands were callused, but the scar on his arm pointed to something more warlike. 

An eagle cried above and she rolled her eyes. 

Ikaros could be such a dramatic bastard sometimes. 

The rickety stairs pressed into her back while she leaned back, her hand still wrapped around her unsheathed sword. 

“Care to explain who might be looking for me?”

The man shrugged, hitching the knot of his chiton back onto his shoulder. “My name is Elpenor of Athens. I had heard tell that there was a great  _ mistios _ on the island of Kephallonia, who had been blessed by the Queen of the Gods herself.”

Kassandra rolled her eyes and turned to go up the stairs. “Not interested.”

“Not even if I were to tell you who I was interested in you killing?” 

“Go away, asshole!” she shouted. 

“I’ll pay you your weight in gold to kill the Wolf of Sparta!”

She stopped in her steps, her foot frozen in midair. 

A cold wind seemed to blow across her face and the world stopped moving.

Her hand tensed and Ikaros stopped circling above, swooping down to land on her shoulder. 

“Why would you pay so much for a  _ mistios _ to kill the Wolf of Sparta?”

_ Pater, please, don't do it, pater _ , she could remember a frightened girl crying out while her father's face was like stone and his grip on her arm was a vice. 

The war might be ravaging Hellas outside, but Kephallonia should have been far away enough from it at the very least. And more importantly, how did he know what the Wolf of Sparta meant to her? 

Hera above, it had been so long since she'd heard his name. Almost 2 decades, in fact. Nikolaos of Sparta, greatest of her generals. Father of Alexios and -

Her  _ xiphos _ was tight in her grip and her knuckles were white when she turned back to him, her eyes flashing. He didn't seem too fussed about it, idly turning an Aegitinaean obol over in his hand, before setting it down and looking at a ring on his finger. 

How hadn’t she noticed that before?

She knew that symbol before, where did she -

“So I take it that you're agreeing to the task?”

“Listen here,  _ malaka. _ I answer to no man and I don't like your tone.”

His expression barely changed. “I'll take that as a no, then?”

Her laugh was full of derision. “Oh no, I'll do it. But not for you. And you're going to pay me twice my weight in Athenian gold in exchange for the head of Nikolaos of Sparta.”

A shrug. “Very well,  _ mistios _ . Will you need any help finding him?”

Her eyes were narrowed. “I might be working for you, Elpenor, but I don't have to like you. Get out and if you're lucky, I'll bring you his head.”

Her footsteps echoed on the steps as she staggered into her house, barely finding the strength to pull out the battered and torn Spartiate’s cloak that was all she had left to remind herself of Nikolaos, Wolf of Sparta and father of Kassandra. 

“Forgive me,  _ pater _ , for what is about to come.”

High in the sky, she could feel the eyes of the gods on her, waiting for her to make her choice. 

Oh, Hera forgive her for what was going to happen. 

_ You have to leave the island, Kassandra. Go to my sanctuary in Korinthia when you have done the deed.  _

She looked out over the waters that led away from the peace of Kephallonia and over the Great Green, towards Sparta and Megara and the war there. 

There had never been a choice, after all.

Kassandra of Sparta picked up her sword and her helm, her necklace lying close against her heart.

_ Go to Megaris, Kassandra. When the time comes, you will pave the path that  _ **_he_ ** _ will walk. _

_ The empty shards of Cassian Andor’s mind snapped at that.  _

_ What path? _

Kassandra shook her head, grabbing her weapons and walking down to the harbour, to where the Great Green called. 


	9. Shield of Thunder

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Piedmont, 2016.
> 
> Jyn Erso, Eagle Bearer

The road down the mountain was as winding and as difficult as the path off Meteora, especially with Bodhi’s careful driving and Kay monitoring Cassian’s condition in the back.

It was utterly silent, the spell broken only by the sound of the rain against the window. 

Bodhi flicked on the radio, trying to ease the tension.

There wasn’t anything on in English, but she sat and let the Italian sink into her.

Weather abnormalities. That was what the newscaster was talking about. Rising seas and odd weather formations, almost as if the Earth herself knew that something was wrong here. 

Jyn’s hand instinctively tensed, everything in her protesting the  _ wrongness _ of everything, from the ruins outside, to the ruins of the man laying in the back, to Kay’s tense face and lack of commentary. 

“We should keep going,” Bodhi finally said, breaking the silence. “We shouldn’t stop for anything right now.”

She chanced a look at Kay in the back of the van, whose eyes were still intently scanning the monitors attached to Cassian, down to the maps in her lap, heavily marked in red pen. 

“It’s going to be a long road, do you think we can handle it?”

Kay’s voice was sharp. “We’re going to need to pull him out at some point, guys. He’s pushing it as is.”

Bodhi’s hands tightened for a moment on the steering wheel. He licked his lips, before pausing and closing his mouth. 

There was another moment of silence. 

“Did something happen with you, Kay?” 

At Kay’s glare, he kept talking, filling the van with more awkwardness as he seemed to flounder and backpedal. “I didn’t mean anything by it, I just wanted to say that you guys have seemed awkward every since -”

“Nothing happened, Bodhi,” Kay grumbled. 

“Really? Because Cassian hasn’t talked to you since we busted him out and when you actually did go talk to him, he seemed really on edge.”

Jyn sat deeper in her seat and tried to make herself seem as inconspicuous as possible. It wasn’t her place to get involved with this. 

“It’s not something that’s important for us to know about right now.”

“We need to know what’s going on! If someone’s got secrets, it’ll -”

“Let the man have his secrets, Bodhi,” Jyn finally said, her voice creaky. “If it doesn’t harm us, there’s no need to.”

The van rattled for a moment as it passed over a pothole, Jyn’s finger tracing the route that she barely remembered from so long ago. 

_ We need to hide the Key, Jyn.  _

_ I’ll leave it where no one can take it. You'll  have to leave the city once Caesar’s dead. As long as you're safe, mistios.  _

“Do you want a break soon, Bodhi?” 

He shook his head. 

“We should take one soon for Cassian, though,” Kay said, scribbling something on a notepad. “He’s already pretty close to the edge.”

“Next stop, we can pull him out.”

“You're not listening, Bodhi. Putting him in the Animus in the first place was a mistake. Our chances of getting him to the Grand Temple alive and sane are decreasing by the day.”

Jyn bit the inside of her cheek, trying to just sit and listen. This wasn't her fight. 

The increasingly strained voice of the newscaster stopped and a strange opera song came onto the radio, before her hand reached out and turned it off, sinking them back into their uncomfortable silence. 

The silence washed around them and she forced herself to keep plotting the route, guiding Bodhi around the cameras that she knew would be watching for them. 

Was it worth taking Cassian to Thera after all?

Juno was a vengeful bitch at the best of times and only the gods knew what she wanted. 

There was a sharp blip from the machine and Kay swore. “We’re using up too much power in the Animus. Stop the van, Bodhi - it’s time to pull him out.”

“Not yet - we’re still too exposed, Kay!”

“If we leave him in, he’ll die!”

Jyn’s voice sounded like the crack of a whip. “How long will it take to pull him out?”

Kay rubbed the back of his neck. “To shut down all the systems? We’ll have to take maybe 10 minutes at best.”

“Can we keep going a little longer? If we can get to Perugia before nightfall, we can take a bit of time there.”

A shake of his head. “I’m going to pull him out. We can’t keep going like this - he’s going to start fragmenting soon.”

_ Hesitation is death. _

“Pull him out. We’re not stopping, though,” she said, with a nod towards Bodhi. “Do you think we can make Perugia by nightfall?”

Bodhi’s eyes flicked down to the maps she was holding, before the van leapt forward, Bodhi staring intently at the road while the beeping from the monitors in the back seemed ever increasingly oppressive, almost as bad as the screams had been in Guy de Naplouse’s hospital, all those years ago.

The countryside outside blurred, the olive trees giving way to mountains and the great blocks of marble and the distant laughter of long-forgotten -

No. 

They had died long ago. 

It was so loud.

She could hear  _ her _ , almost in the noises around them.  

No.

This wasn’t what she needed.

Goosebumps prickled down her spine and she could feel herself tensing, before she forced herself to sit deeper in the seat. 

How bad would Cassian be when he was pulled out?

Her fingers started to quietly tap out a half-forgotten rhyme on the window. There wasn’t much to do left but wait.

The sun was moving towards the west in its inexorable march when Kay finally sighed and leaned back. “There’s nothing else I can do.”

Her eyes flicked towards Cassian. “Is he out yet?”

A shrug. “He should be. Give it a moment.”

A sudden gasp from the back seat. “Ou ksyníēmi!  Zdeú sōson !”

Jyn sat upright, reaching for her spear out of instinct and twisting. “Ónoma soi tí estin! tí egéneto?” she said, her voice croaky and her phrasing still rusty. 

_ Why did he know Greek? _

Oh Gods above. 

Kassandra was still in control.

She swallowed down, watching him - no, it didn’t seem like Cassian was there - it was Kassandra of Sparta, not Cassian Andor. He looked around frantically, as though he was trying to understand where and -

A flicker crossed his face and he shook his head, like a dog emerging from water. 

“What happened?” he rasped out. 

Kay let out a deep sigh of relief, starting to yank out the needles and probes that were attached to him. “Are you feeling alright?”

The scars were raised and white against Cassian’s skin and Jyn repressed the urge to shiver. 

_ Oh gods, she had almost been too late.  _

“I saw her,” he said, rubbing his head. Cassian raised his head, staring at Jyn, his eyes strangely unfocused. “She tried to tell me something.”

Jyn narrowed her eyes, looking for the residual signs of the Animus on Cassian’s face. “Do you know what she tried to tell you?”

A shake of his head and his posture changed, his back straightening and his face setting into an expression she recognised from the trenches of World War 1. 

“She wants Cassian to choose something,” Cassian said, every inflection reminding her ever more of Lydia Frye. “Once we get to the Grand Temple.”

The van rattled again, and Bodhi called out, his voice tense. “Are we still trying to get to Perugia or are we making straight for Brindisi?”

Cassian shook his head again, his voice returning to normal, even as his eyes darted about at ghosts that only he could see. “We’re running out of time. We have to get to the Temple as soon as possible.”

Kay’s entire posture was tense, holding himself as if Cassian’s presence would burn him. 

“Can you tell me who and where you are?” Kay said, everything sounding as if he could barely hold on. 

A nod.

“My name is Cassian Andor.”

Kay leaned forward. “And the year?”

“1918,” he said, the lilt in his voice reminiscent of Lydia -

Cassian and Kay both jumped at that, while Jyn stared in shock. 

“No!” Cassian shouted again. “It's 2016 now! I know.”

He hit the side of his head sharply, before Kay grabbed his arm and Jyn clambered over the glovebox to crouch in front of him, not an easy task with the bulk of the Animus in the way.

“What did she tell you, Cassian Andor of the Brotherhood?” Jyn said, her voice pitched soft and low as if she was talking with a skittish colt. “Can you remember enough for me?”

A shake of his head. “She told me that I had to choose.”

“Who is this woman?” Kay snapped out before Jyn held her arm out in front of him. 

_ What did Juno want with Cassian? _

He pressed his hands into his temples, as if the pressure could drive away the headache. 

“What did you have to choose?”

“I don't know yet,” he managed to stammer out. “But I'm really sick of being the pawn in this game.”

Jyn snorted. 

Whatever Those That Came Before called themselves, whether they painted themselves as gods or just slavers, they would forever be toying with people.

Cassian’s voice was sharp, breaking through the cloud of memory in her head. “I know that we have to get to Thera by the solstice, or everything will be lost.”

“That's awfully ominous,” Kay said, his gaze wary. 

He sighed deeply. “I only caught a glimpse when I was still in Ezio’s head, but I think there's a solar event coming.”

“Cassian, you realise that we have less than a week to do that, right?”

A solemn nod, which spoke to Jyn of Brutus and Altair and the choices that they had made in the name of protecting Cassian. 

Bodhi’s soft ‘fuck’ was the only sound that could be heard for a long time. 

Jyn twisted around, looking through the window to see the endless stretches of the Italian countryside. 

Bodhi’s face was hard and he tensed his jaw. “Then we'd best get to Croatia tonight.”

The van sped onwards, the sky darkening and the moon rising to illuminate the road. 

Oh Gods, protect them all from whatever was to come. 


	10. Mistress of the Wine Dark Sea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Slovenia/Megaris, 2016/430BC
> 
> Cassian Andor/Kassandra of Sparta.

Kassandra of Sparta breathed deep, the scent of the Great Green settling in- 

No. 

Cassian tightened his hands on the railing, leaning over for a moment to get his bearings. 

He knew who he was. 

He did. 

No.

Did he?

_ Release me from my prison, Cassian Andor of the Brotherhood.  _

The salt of the sea sank deep into his bones and he let himself relax as he looked at the gentle waves, hearing a set of almost imperceptible footsteps behind him. 

He let the Eagle of his sight take over, seeing nothing but the grey outline of Altair. 

_ Where are you?  _ Altair snapped. 

Deep breath in. 

Hold it. 

Breathe out. 

“Slovenia,” he muttered as much for himself as for Altair. “I'm in Slovenia and we're driving to Thera and the Grand Temple.”

_ Good. Tell me your name.  _

“Cassian Andor,” he said, the lights getting to bright for him to handle. “You seem uncomfortable,” he said for lack of anything else to say, once he'd gotten over the brightness behind his eyes. 

Altair shrugged.  _ “The others have always been better with water than me.” _

Cassian huffed a laugh, feeling the prickle of paranoia melt away while he looked at the red and gold figures that his Eagle showed. “Hey, was it a glitch in the Animus that you couldn't swim?” 

_ “I grew up in Masyaf, Cassian. In the high mountains. Tis  a little hard to learn how to swim without any water around.” _

The waves lapped gently at the base of the cliff and Cassian relaxed, staring at the little flickers of light and shifting colours, while Jyn’s eagle dived into the water, a quicksilver wriggle of a fish in its beak. 

_ “There's something wrong with everything here,”  _ Ezio’s gentle voice sounded from where he'd perched on the railing of the lookout.  

Cassian raised an eyebrow. Ezio would always tell him in his own time. 

Ezio’s gaze was sharp as he looked at everyone on the deck, as if he was trying to decide how each could be killed.  _ “This would be the perfect place to attack someone.” _

He nodded. 

Still. 

It didn't mean he had to like - 

He could feel the vestiges of Kassandra’s mind butting up against his and he felt his hands tighten. 

_ You shouldn't go into the Animus, Cassian.  _ Ezio said, his voice full of concern.  _ You're slipping too much.  _

“Thanks,” he said, swallowing heavily and gritting out the words. “Like I didn't know that already.”

As if he couldn't see Kay’s guilt and his anger and the tiny emotions that told him that it was a bad idea and also a necessary evil. 

As if he didn't avoid Bodhi’s eyes, the look that told Cassian that he knew exactly what he was going through. 

And Jyn - 

He wouldn't get into that. 

Ezio’s hand was light and his voice deceptively relaxed. “We'll be here for you. No matter what happens.”

Cassian turned around, heading back to the van and ignoring the way that the words sounded almost like a death sentence. 

The table of the Animus was cold under his back and the needle was cold under his skin and there was nothing but cold and white and -

  
  
  
  


\---   
  
  
  


 

The breeze rolling off the Great Green was cool against her skin and Kassandra closed her eyes, enjoying the salt spray against her skin. 

Barnabas’s voice echoed like a horn from below decks as the rowers slowly found a rhythm and she caught herself smiling at the sound of their singing. 

_ ego de'soptron een, o'pos aee vle'pis mi _

“One!” Was the roar from below. 

_ ego chito'n genimin, opos aee foris mae, _

“Two!” 

In front of the prow, Ikaros dived into the water, a quicksilver gleam of feathers and muscles as he moved beneath the water and then there was an explosion of salt spray when he resurfaced, only to land on her shoulder. 

Right. 

Exactly what she needed. 

The cold was a sharp shock and she suppressed a shiver. 

She closed her eyes as the cold water dripped down her spine, before -

Alright, there he went.

Barnabas’ footsteps sounded like logs falling as he went up to meet where she was standing on the deck, before he stood, seeming for all the world like he was kicking his heels before he gave up. 

“Who's the unlucky  _ malaka _ who has the great mistios of Kephallonia being sent after them?” he boomed, his voice as deep and as loud as one of Zeus’s lightning bolts.

Kassandra stilled for a moment, Ikaros preening and cleaning his feathers on her shoulder as she thought.

Oh well.

The truth would out itself at some point.

“We make for Megaris, Barnabas,” she said, her voice full of false cheer. “Today, we hunt wolves!”

He looked askance, his eyes flicking downwards for barely a moment, before he held his head high and laughed. “The gods do have a sense of humour, Kassandra of Sparta!

Her face formed an involuntary moue. “That they do. And Hera can be a true bitch sometimes.”

“Well!” Barnabas laughed again, his voice full of simple joy. “The ones the gods put through the greatest toils are the greatest heroes of all! And you belong amidst their ranks, Eagle Bearer.”

She rolled her eyes and adjusted the fall of her sword belt. “Just get us to Megaris, Barnabas.”

The Adrestia sailed ever closer to Megaris with every moment.

Closer to Megaris, her father and the war. 

_ Good. This is the path you must trace, Eagle Bearer, a goddess whispered to her, her all-seeing eye barely visible at the edge of the Hori _ zon -

_ “What the fuck!” Cassian could hear Kay yelling from outside the Animus. “He’s crashing again, I don’t know -” _ _   
_

_ “Put him back in, you idiot!” Bodhi shouted.  _

_ There was the sharp pop-pop of gunshots outside  _ and -

Megaris was crawling with soldiers and the navies of both Sparta and Athens, the harbour blockaded as the great ships sat like squat Titans on the water. 

Kassandra groaned, digging her fingers into the bridge of her nose to relieve her headache. 

Why hadn’t Elpenor mentioned that the entire island was under siege?

_ Malakas. _

“Should we release the naptha?” one of the sailors asked - Xenia, her name was. 

Another deep sigh. 

“Mistios, we need to know!”

Kassandra bit her lip and nodded. “Break the blockade!” 

An answering roar went up from the sailors and Xenia rushed to join the others, assembling the new structure in the middle of the ship, the huge balls of naptha being rolled onto the deck.

A sudden rush and the heartbeat before they made contact with the Athenian ships blockading the -

“Fire arrows!” she shouted. 

Half a heartbeat before it started. 

The ships were engulfed in a terrible, huge flame, green tinges licking at the wood while sailors started to scream - 

Kassandra swallowed down her horror and pushed on. “Ram them!” she shouted, noting another Athenian ship making for them, bearing down hard.

The ships collided with a horrifying crunch, and she tensed for the impact, before running as hard as she could for the other one, unsheathing her sword as she did so. 

The screams kept echoing out over the blood-dark sea.

No.

Keep going.

Her grip was tight.

Hamstring the man to her right, hearing the heavy thud as he dropped. 

Slam her sword into the neck of the next one that tried to come for her.

A gurgle of blood from the deck. 

The sharp slice of a sword across her side, most of it skidding across -

No.

She could feel the blood starting to leak down her side. 

Sweet Hera, she was out of practice. 

Her hand moved of its own volition, her sword flicking out to deal death while the Adrestia’s crew shouted out praise and -

It was over. 

A pair of arms grabbed her and dragged her back to the Adrestia and she could dimly hear voices. 

“Forward! All oars ahead!”

The roar echoed from below decks. 

“Make for Megaris!”

The songs started from below the deck and Barnabas started to shout as he led the chants.

“Row faster, you cowsons!”

Her hand tightened on her sword as she could see the headlands approaching -

_ “Get him out, Kay!” he could hear Bodhi.  _

_ “I’ve got this!” Jyn called out, a sudden rush of sound echoing in the small confines of the van and the door slid open. “Get him out! I’ll find you!” _

Megaris, then.

The burned out hulks of the Athenian ships stood in the harbour, the fires still burning on the ruined decks and Kassandra clenched her hand and unclenched her hand.

_ Hesitation is death, she could hear the Great Lady whisper in her mind. You must not look back, Kassandra of Sparta.  _

Her throat felt deathly raw as she clambered down from the Adrestia’s upper deck to find a Spartiate in full armour, a transverse helm on his head, standing there to meet her.

Her legs felt like reeds in an empty field under her body.

Not surprising that they had sent a commander to meet her. 

Especially with how she had gotten onto the island. 

“You know, there would have been easier ways to get onto Megaris,  _ mistios _ .”

Kassandra laughed dimly, her voice falsely light. “What could I say? I like to make a good first impression.”

A bitter laugh in response. “I can tell. Stentor of Sparta,” he said, not bothering with a proper greeting. 

She laughed, the trickle of blood feeling like the warm touch of a mother running down her side. 

The world spun and her eyes hurt and she tried to put a hand up to her eyes and -

H҉̣̭̦̟̻͟e̴͍͈̱̘̟̘̰͟ ͉̞̱͎̬̱̬̙̝̰̤̘̲̪̬ͅi҉̴̻͓̝̯̜̮͖͍̗̹͉̖̼̯̠̯̕s҉҉͓̖̜̭̖͝ ͟҉͏҉͚̰̭͙̜̝̭̩͓̺̜̘̯͙͖̗͖ͅc͏͏͓̠̙̬̳̩̼͎͈̮̙͓̘ǫ̙̦͍͓̪̟͖̲̪̼̝̣͚͇̳̕͠͡m̵̨͞͏̭̯̱̜̣͎̳̲̞͓̲̜i̢̟͕͚̯̤̯̠͘͡͠n̨̟̬̮̺̲͇͡͡g̴̨̧̦̩̖̥̞͍ͅ.͘͝͏̴̣̬̤̭͈̝͖̲̳̠̠̼̘͚̝͢

̡̛̤̬̠̣̜̲̼̺̯̱͘ͅ

̲̬̗͖͈͠I̷̢̥̯͚̞̲͈̩ ͟͝҉̙̰̝̬͕͖̟̳̱̬ͅa̰͖̪͙͎̺̱͔̭̥̘̕͠m̸̛̘̜̬̙̖͍̗̹͖̼͖͓͎̪̺͢ ҉̢̥̪̲̟̤̫̲͔̬̯̗̳̩̯͈f҉̺̘̞̖̪̦͇̣̙̤̲͔͉̖͍̩̮͠r͏҉̗͎̱̜̠e̷҉̵̵̰̦̭̳̮̝ͅę̨͉̞̤̲̹͕͎͔͙̗̺̠.̙̝͕͈̞̙̳̗͕̱͉̟̲̱̪̳̗̣͉͞͝ ̷̛̱̬̠̖͙͢͟

̳͈̹͔̫͎̩̺̤̦͓̝̪͉̻̺̦̳̦͢

̵̧̧̦͎̲̪̳̦̠͇̪̣̤̬̥̟̩̭͟͡ͅR̷̴̭̳͎̱̺̕e̠̭̰͚͍͓͔̹̥͟ͅl̰͈͎̩͙̠̺͈̟̫̜͘͜͞͝͝ȩ̵̛̠̤͓̣͙̤̹̦̻̭̹̱̱̠̳̱̰͟ͅa̸̸̠̠̼̙͍ͅş̧̯͙͙̼̪̳̥͖͜͡e̶̵̸͉̲͔̞͍ ̸͍̦̣̗̖̜̫̗̘͝ͅṃ̧̼͉͟͝͞ͅe̵̞͕̯̰͔̭̯̞͖̥͖͠ͅ ̢̥̺͕̘͕̠͓̪̖̻̮͈̜̞̻̠̱̘͢͟ͅf͏̸̶͕̯̻̩̺̪r̴̡̨͕͓̳͘͢o̵̬̗̮͇̩̫͍̖̲̰̭m̶̶̠̞̺͔̰̰͉͍͇̳̮͚͕̫̘̬͟ ͟͏͈̬̹̭̘͎̪̖̙̥̗̣͕͜ͅt̙͖̦̞̘̰̮̻̥̜̥̖̣͜͞͞h̛̛̳̹͍͇͔͠͠e̤̱̲͈̱̘̜̭̬̗̖͉͙͉͕͔̘͢ ̵̴̛͉̦͈̟̩̲̩̠̳̱̤͚̩̬͙̝̟̜͞͞ͅp̨̡͎̹̭͉̰̙͓̤̫̮̻̼̭͎͔͖̳͡r̡̢̹̣̞̟̺̳̭̗̺̗̗̣͚͔i̴̢̼̩̺͓̖̫̬̪͈̲̪̝͕̗̩s̡̪͍͇̼o̷̘͉̫̰̱͔̱͚̯̤͢n̶̘̰̪͓̪̠̠͉͖͓͉̞̜̮͘͢͝ͅͅ.̶͜͢҉̬̤̮̟̞̙̥͕̩̥̣̟̳̘

̨̹̥̘̟̯͕̞͇͝

̛͓̰͚͚̼͓̝̝̝̱̟͕̦̟̩O̡̼͉̟̬̦̻̺̝̼͕̟̭̲̺̥͚͞ͅͅͅp̷̶̭͖͕͈̳̳̮͢͠͝e̸̕͝͏̠͉̹̱̭̝͈̙͖n̮̤̯͍͙͙̘̮̼̳͖͕͉̦̬͢͝ ͏҉̶̣̥̻̗̙y͏̸̠̲̩͎̰̣͕͉̞̙̙̲̹̰̥͈o҉̧̜̼̻͉͕̖̦͇̰̜͎͚̦͟͝ͅư̼̦͚̮̱͍̫̗̪̺͚͉̘̥͎̝̙͔r̛͓͙͙̘̩̳̙̰̜̟̮ͅ ҉͏̤̩̳̹͚̮̜̱̮ͅe͏̶͈͖̟̹̱̙̟̣̝̺̮͔̺͚͕̻̮͜y̡̧̺̻̰̩̮̬̙̩̠̺ͅe̷̡̡̫̦̗̺̙̻̰̳̮̙̕̕s͕̻̪͕̪̝̝̺̼̯̱̱̞̪̝͜͞͝

 


	11. Hope For Soldiers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Slovenia, 2016.
> 
> Jyn Erso, Mistress of the Assassin Brotherhood.

The van rattled hard against the twisting defiles of the cliff road and  Bodhi jerked the steering wheel sharply, and Jyn threw out an arm to keep herself from toppling over as the cars behind them started to inch ever closer. 

“How the fuck did they find us?” Kay shouted. 

“Can we save this for another time?” she said, pulling out their stash of weaponry and pulling out a rifle and setting it up. “We’ll work that out once we’ve gotten the others off our tail.”

The van veered on the road again and Jyn felt herself being flung hard against the window. 

A quick glance in the mirrors. 

Fuck.

They were getting closer.

She could see the Empire’s six-spoked insignia painted on the side of the cars and she grabbed the rifle to her tighter. 

How much ammo was there?

Ten bullets. 

Shit.

How many were there?

She bit her lip, trying to calculate the numbers. 

Above her, her eagle soared high above the vans and she could feel her sight start to merge with his, the world cast in strange shadows and the sound of wingbeats echoing. 

The sea glinted bright like a field of sapphires along the road in the corner of her vision and then she saw them. 

There were four SUVs there, each presumably full of people, and a handful of motorbikes with the convoy as well.

Kay had had a good question.

How the hell had they been able to scramble the force this fast?

Not important right now. 

Her shoulder was against the back door of the van now and she could feel every rumble of the road under the wheels. 

“We need to get him out, Kay!”

Bodhi.

That was Bodhi.

Fuck.

“No! Keep him in there!”

“Are you joking? He’ll be killed if he’s caught in the Animus.”

Her shoulder rattled with every movement. 

“Keep the van going, Bodhi.”

“What the hell are you doing?” Kay yelled. 

A shake of her head. 

The weight of her spear was heavy against her spine. 

“I’ll take care of it!”

She flung the door open with all her strength, kneeling and taking aim.

Her hand tightened on the trigger, in a smooth motion that was easier than breathing.

A tyre exploded and Jyn swung the sights to focus on the other tyres. 

Another one. 

Eight bullets left. 

One car stalled in the middle of the road and the rest swerved to avoid it, keeping the chase going.

Shit.

They were still getting closer. 

Another tyre exploded and she could feel -

A bullet whistled overhead and she grabbed the van door, pulling it shut just as a bullet hole was punched into it.

Fuck.

Gods, how the hell was she supposed to fight against this?

Another set of bullets punched their way through and she slammed the door shut, taking a deep breath. 

Kay’s face was grey. 

“I need to get him out of here before the power supply blows.”

A bite of her lip.

The van swerved hard again and Jyn felt herself being slammed into the wall.

“How much time do you need?”

“Ten minutes.”

Her mind started racing through the possibilities. 

They didn’t have enough people. 

Wait.

Her eyes flicked down to Cassian’s sleeping face. 

“If we pull him out faster, will he still be Kassandra?”

She saw the glint of realisation on Kay’s face and he nodded sharply and started yanking out wires while the van swerved on the road. 

“They’re still shooting at us!” Bodhi shouted.

“Thank you, we already fucking know!” was Kay’s sharp reply as he started tapping away at the Animus controls. 

She took another breath, holding her hand on the door handle, waiting for a straight stretch of road and then -

Another quick squeeze of the trigger at a rider on a motorbike, who went flying off the side of the cliff road with the speed of the shot. 

They were still coming, and more importantly, from the brief glimpse she’d gotten, they were gaining on her. 

“You still need to hold them off!”

A shake of her head. “Not a big deal.”

A moment to breathe, holding her spear in hand. 

“They’re getting closer!” Bodhi shouted. 

One more moment. 

“Keep driving! I’ll catch up with you!”

The door swung out and Jyn threw herself out onto the road, feeling the air being knocked out of her lungs as she did so. 

Right.

Her spear was gripped in her hand as loosely as her mother had taught her and she  _ dropped _ , running as hard as she could for the first car. 

A bullet whistled just shy of her left ear and she felt herself ducking. 

Her eagle let out a loud cry above them. 

The spear burst into flames and she ducked under a hail of bullets just as the car came close and -

She slammed the spear into the car hard, yanking it out and throwing herself to the side before the entire thing erupted in flames, barely sparing a moment to -

The next one was almost on her and she spun out of the way before running after it.

The van was in the distance, nimbly negotiating the tight curves of the cliff road. 

Good.

They had a little more time. 

A group of men ran at her and she took a breath before running into the fray.

They needed to buy more time.

Drop and slash at a hamstring. 

Shove her spear upwards, feeling the give of someone’s throat. 

A bullet slammed hard into her side and she spared a moment to glance at it before - 

She threw her spear as hard as she could at the man that had done it, before running forward to pull it out of his corpse and take on the next one. 

She shoved it deep, feeling the give from him, keeping the body in front of him and heard the loud splat of bullets landing in it. 

A huge black car started to bear down on her and she pulled her spear free, running hard from it before -

She twisted in the road, letting it pass beyond her before throwing her spear at it hard, watching the green flames envelop the car. 

There were still two cars going after the van but her breath was coming out in shallow pants and her vision was going dark at the edges, the world starting to blur and the pain in her side  _ ached _ and -

She could see Altair in the corner of her vision, fighting as hard as he had that night in Acre - 

No, it was Kassandra, her movements as graceful and as destructive as one of the gods or -

Lydia, Brutus, Edward, Connor - they’d all blurred together into a single figure and-

Wait. 

Her eyes flicked up and -

She  _saw_.


	12. Lord of the Silver Bow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Road To Nowhere, 2016.
> 
> Cassian Andor, The Man Out Of Time.

Kassandra of Sparta woke abruptly, her eyes blurring over and a strange man leaning over her, before -

_ No, he was Cassian Andor of the Brotherhood - _

Her vision cleared up before -

The man looked down at her again and -

_ What was Kay doing here? What the fuck had - _

Her hands came up to hit him and she opened her mouth to breathe deep and shout before she noticed-

Wait, why were her hands like that? Almost as if -

_ What the fuck was going on? Cassian could feel his mind start to - _

There was a brief but firm tap on her shoulder. 

The shock startled her into silence and she watched the man start talking very fast, a language that she only remembered in the deepest parts of her brain, understanding it even if she didn’t know what was going on.

“Good, you’re awake,” he said, rubbing his hand on his forehead. “We don’t have very much time because Jyn’s -”

He shook his head. “Ok, all you need to understand is that we’ve got a whole lot of bad guys after us and if they catch up, we’re all dead.”

Her brow furrowed. “Who is we? Why am I here?”

_ I’m sorry about this, Kassandra, a man’s voice whispered in the back of her head. I’m pretty sure that you’re in my body. _

“What the fuck?” she said, blinking away her confusion. “Did Juno send you?”

The man let out a long-suffering exhale before nodding. “Yes, Juno sent you here and if you don’t help us out, Juno’s going to be very pissed, and more importantly, we’re going to all be dead.”

The world went clear and Cassian Andor shook his head rapidly before he heard Bodhi shouting from the driver’s seat. “Kassandra, Cassian, whoever the fuck you are, you need to get going now! Jyn’s in deep shit!”

_ You need to go!  _ Kassandra shouted. _ No hesitation. _

He shook his head, looking around them quickly for any weapons. There were no familiar bracers, or any knives or  _ anything that she could recognise as a weapon _ . 

He tightened his hand before reaching out for a gun, instinctively chambering a round. 

Outside, he could hear the sounds of a fight, the screams there echoing the ones in his mind. 

His hand tensed instinctively. 

A scream echoed from outside and he knew that his shot had hit home. 

There was no time to dwell on it.

_ Let me take over, Cassian!  _ Lydia shouted.  _ If not me, than one of the others. She’ll be torn apart out there! _

There was a guttural shout from outside and Cassian could see green flames outside, reflected in the dull metal of the van’s walls. 

Another shot pockmarked the door of the van.

_ Do it!  _ Lydia shouted, her voice full of all the fury that the Angel of Verdun could muster. 

Cassian took a deep breath and -

Lydia Frye cracked her neck, casting her eyes about her for her enemies.

There. 

She stretched her arms out, looking at the strange gun in her hand before casting it aside.

“Go! Now!” the man from the front seat shouted as the van veered sharply again.

Lydia breathed deeply and jumped, tackling someone on a motorbike, letting her instincts take over, slamming her hand into their throat as they went flying and -

Altair of Masyaf stood straight, his muscles relaxing as he ran straight into the fray, his eyes narrowing and the world bleaching around him into shades of gold against grey as the flames of Jyn’s spear died out and she let out a shout, before turning to look at him.

“Well met by moonlight,  _ mistios _ !” he shouted, the cockiness that he remembered from Al Quds entering his voice.

She grunted sharply, throwing her spear into the windshield of another machine ( _ car,  _ Cassian Andor’s voice whispered). “Shut the fuck up and help me kill these idiots!”

He shrugged, running hard towards the car barreling towards them.

His hands grabbed onto the bonnet of it, before throwing himself through the windshield, a knife slamming into the throat of the driver before he realised what was happening.

Another kick towards the man in the passenger seat.

The man there grunted loudly as he was slammed into the door, before leaping at Altair and -

The car started to veer hard and from the window, Altair could see the edge of the road -

Cassian Andor pushed off hard towards his attacker, close enough to see the whites of his eyes before his hand came up and his Blade drawn, blood gushing out of the gap that suddenly appeared in his attacker’s throat. 

His other hand reached towards the door handle, pulling it towards him with all his strength and -

Altair took over once more, throwing himself onto the road, his chest heaving with the exertion and the confusion of what happened. 

A hand suddenly came into his field of view. 

He reached up to grab it, feeling calluses against his palms before he caught sight of who it was.

“Thanks for that. They’re mostly dead now, I suspect,” a woman’s voice said, full of false cheer and amusement. 

A pair of bright green eyes and a smile, as strained as any -

Cassian hunched over, heaving and feeling the nausea rising up in his throat. “How many?” he managed to grit out.

“I’m sorry?”

He shook his head, looking down at the tacky red liquid on his hands. Blood. 

He had blood all over his hands. 

“How many are dead now?”

Jyn huffed a brief laugh and sat herself down on the road, where an Eagle suddenly perched on her head. “Look. You’re asking the wrong damn question.”

The flames flickered in the edge of his vision and he felt something in the back of his head, almost as if it were trying to push against the inside of his skull.

“What question should I be asking, then?”

Another shrug, she said, with her eyes fixed on the horizon, where a van looking definitely the worse for wear was picking its slow way down the road. “Not that.”

“Why?”

“Because if you’re going to do this?” she said, glaring and her eyes boring into him. “If you’re really going to do this, Cassian Andor, you’d best get used to that feeling on your hands. Because that’s the only goddamn way that we’re going to survive this.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this took so goddamn long, I swear to God that I actually meant to get back to this at some point, I just had to juggle a full time job, a double degree and a LOT of mental strife.


	13. Son of None

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Battle of Hattin, the Sea of Gallilee. 
> 
> Jyn Erso, 2016.

In her dreams that night, Jyn saw a dead man kneeling beside a lake that glittered like blue sapphires - whereupon a prophet had once walked as light as the air itself - nothing awaited them here but blood and death.

She heard herself whispering, her hands shaking ever so slightly. “Umar, this is not necessary - the Brotherhood, we’ll figure it out -”

“There’s nothing you can do,” he said, a line of steel in his voice as he rose.

Her hand flexed at her side, helpless in that moment.

“My son,” he whispered to her, his hands bound in front of him as he led the way towards his own doom and the other kneeling Assassin he would be traded for. “Altair. My son - he’s at - he’s at Masyaf. He’s at Masyaf. You have -”

She nodded solemnly, the spear on her back weighing her down like a heavy stone. There was nothing she could do.

“I’ll tell him.”

The Crusader King Guy de Lusignon lounged flanked by his personal guard on a dais on the edge of a bloody field, his face stern and his eyes hard, regarding another man knelt before him, his own hands bound and his eyes covered. 

A gust of wind carrying the stench of death from the bloody field rippled amidst the banners of the army that formed ranks around Jyn and the walking dead man, a phalanx pointing spears at the throats of these interlopers.

She could hear the clinking of mail and horses behind the King.

They’d brought an army to a hostage exchange.

The back of her neck prickled and her hand flexed.

An eagle’s wings beat heavily overhead.

“Please, _misthios._ You have to tell my son. Altaïr, son of Umar - tell him what happened here,” the man she was reluctantly leading said, his voice stronger now, though still quiet, for her ears alone. 

A cool breeze rushed in from over the sparkling lake, and clean, a startlingly beautiful scene for a man’s last moments. The shaggy ends of her hair brushed against the side of her face and she sank deeper into the shadows of her hood. 

“I have brought you a spy! A spy for a spy! I want my man back!” she called out, pitching her voice lower, knowing in her heart of hearts that whatever happened here, there would be no happy ending. 

The guards atop the dais held their own spears ready as she passed between the rows of soldiers. “Whatever happens here this day, I swear to you, Umar ibn Ahmad, I will tell your son myself. I will tell him that his father died as a proud member of the Brotherhood, faithful to the Creed to his last breath,” she assured the dead man his last wish would be honored in a hushed whisper. 

A swordsman, his hand resting on his hip, stood above the other bound and blindfolded man as Jyn and her sacrificial offering stopped some small distance before the dais.

“Steady,” she whispered half to herself.

She flexed her hand at her side. 

Her heart beat faster and her spear seemed to grow ever heavier and -

“You have brought the spy?” the King said, his voice loud and higher pitched than she had anticipated.

She nodded.

The air grew heavy with anticipation as the king eyed her for a long moment before gesturing offhandedly, a palm upturned towards the sky, fingers curled loosely.

A swift cut and the hands of the other man before the king were unbound, his eyes still covered.

Her eyes were fixed forwards on the exchange, her hand loose at her side, ready if need be.

Released, the other man stumbled and rubbed his wrists as Umar walked forward to take his place, his legs shaking and -

“Assassins,” the king spat. “You stand in the way of knowledge, of the future -”

She looked up, inclining her head to the king in acknowledgement and veiled defiance of his admonition.

“By the laws of guest right, I demand safe conduct from this place, protected and unharmed,” she called out. 

There was a laugh from beside where the king sat, a man garbed in black emerged smiling from the shadows. “Guest right. By what measure would oathbreakers and turncoats have any recourse for guest right?”

It was the work of a heartbeat - a sword descended and a spurt of blood and Umar’s head was -

She pounced, a scream rushing from her throat as she ran towards the dais, her vision turning red with the blood around her, cut through with the green of the spear as it ignited, and a haze fell over her. The only thing she could hear was the pounding of her heart and the screaming of men and horses as they fell, then there was darkness and the feeling of falling and -

A vaguely familiar man screamed in front of her, but there was no time to dwell on who it was, as the wall of cavalry rushed ever closer towards them.

Her chest felt tight and there was something in the air and her mind was shouting at her to duck, to keep going -

Where were Saladin’s men?

Where was the other army?

A horse whinnied in the distance and she looked up to see a charge rushing towards her.

She took a deep breath.

A clink as she pulled her sword belt away and let it fall to the ground.

She’d die today with her sword in hand.

Her heart was steady.

Her feet planted themselves heavily in the earth beneath them, already slippery with blood.

A horn sounded in the distance and she felt the rumble of a charge from behind her.

Saladin’s army.

They were here.

She threw herself to the side as the hoofbeats sounded around her. 

A man rushed into the fray, the banner of the Assassins falling out of his hand as he was cut down, and she drew her spear from her back in her other hand.

She turned her head quickly to follow his fall, barely registering his face. 

He was dead. No time to dwell on it.

Jyn could feel her sword bite into a man’s neck as her side burned from a lucky strike and her hood was pushed back by the flat of a blade slamming into the side of her head while the sapphires glittered on the surface of the lake where a twice-risen man had once walked.

Her jerkin stuck to her side and she brushed her hand against it, feeling only the stickiness of blood and mud.

She felt her eyes slip and then open -

The eagle swooped overhead and she saw through his eyes for a moment, the world tinged in gold and grey as the centre of the Crusader armies was crushed and -

She fell back into her own body and -

Jyn opened her eyes with a heaving gasp, her hand falling to her side half expecting the feel of blood and instead coming to rest on her gun, feeling the cold touch of steel against her fingertips. 

There was no sound around her but the near silent whisper of machines and breathing, the muffled whooshing of air flowing around the van as it drove on.

She fell back against the solid wall of the van, the road bumpy beneath it, her heart beating heavily in her chest and she felt the chill set back into her bones. 

“Hard to sleep?”

Jyn laughed, opening her eyes to look at Cassian where he sat in the front seat, his eyes as haunted as ever, hunched over the steering wheel as if the entire weight of the world rested on his shoulders. 

Not Altaïr, not Lydia, not even bloody Kassandra.

Just Cassian, the man.

She leaned her head against the cool metal of the van, before pulling herself upright and picking her way past the detritus of the Animus and Kay and Bodhi’s sleeping figures. 

“Need some company?”

He cast a quick glance at her, a smirk at the corner of his mouth that almost reminded her of Ezio. “Do I have a choice?”

She shrugged, settling into the front seat. “Course you do. That’s what the Brotherhood’s always been talking about, isn’t it?”

“Doesn’t feel like I’ve got much of one.”

“Destiny’s a bitch.”

The silence stretched on, as the road kept going and Cassian’s eyes still flickered across the empty darkness.

“What’s it like?”

“What’s what like?”

He shrugged. “You know - the immortality thing.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, feeling the weight of the years press on. “It’s - it’s not something you can explain or imagine. It just happens.”

“Happens to you or happens around you?” he said, a lazy smile on his face, so achingly reminiscent of those that had come before.

“Is there a difference? Life happens and you just sort of -” she said, waving a hand absently.

Cassian nodded, almost to himself before shaking his head, as if he was trying to shake away a wasp. “Can you hear her?”

Jyn’s head jerked upright. “Hear what?”

“ _ Her _ .” 

She forced herself to keep her voice light. “And what does she tell you to do?”

“The sun,” he muttered. “And the sun's son. She tells me about them.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Her son? Did Juno have a son -”

His head was shaking and he was muttering, half to someone else, before his body shifted and his face settled into a stubborn expression she remembered from the trenches of Verdun. “He’s alright now. It just needed to pass. It was nice to see you fight again -”

Her hand clenched and she reached across the glovebox to do what, she didn’t know. 

Cassian - or whoever was in there right now - shook his head again and he was back to himself, his face covered almost by a shroud. 

“Does that happen often?” she said for lack of anything else to say, every muscle in her body taut like a bowstring.

He laughed before rubbing a hand over his face, never taking his eyes off the road. “You have no idea.”

“Can I do -”

“You can’t do anything to stop this,” he snapped. “I don’t think you understand what’s happening here.”

“I’m sick of going around in circles! Either talk to me or let Altaïr, or Ezio or whoever else is running around in that head with you talk to me because I  _ need to know _ .”

He breathed deeply, before his jaw settled and he relaxed slightly. “It’s hard - it’s just - I can’t focus, it’s so loud all the time - I can’t tell what’s real anymore. But - they’re real. At least, to me.”

“If that’s what you have to tell yourself to keep going, you might as well keep doing that. But  _ she _ wants something and I need to stop her.”

Cassian cast a sidelong glance at her, an unreadable expression there. “How long have you been trying to kill her?”

“No one’s told you?”

“That’s kind of the point. Everyone knew you but -”

“No one really knew me,” she leaned back, propping her feet on the dashboard. “It’s not that complicated. I’ve been tracking whispers and half-truths for longer than you can imagine - all I know is that I have to stop a goddess and that the best way to do it was to attach myself to your bloodline. And besides, nothing’s strange anymore after you’ve seen a spear burst into flames from your hand or once you’ve charged No Man’s Land with no backup and survived. How about something in return?”

A slight nod from Cassian in reply.

“Why does Abstergo want to locate the Pieces of Eden?”

Something flickered over his face, almost too fast for her to notice. 

He ground his teeth for a moment. “I’m not sure. World domination?”

She laughed, almost more of an exhale, before shaking her head. “That’s not it. They’re after something more.”

“How would you know that?”

A shrug. “Trust me, I know these guys. They’re after something a thousand times more dangerous than just the Apple. They’re going after it too harshly just for one piece.”

Cassian took a deep breath. “Didn’t they start the Crusades to get the Apple?”

Jyn shrugged. “It’s overplayed. Trust me. The Templars just exploited an existing war. This isn’t just the Apple. It’s almost as if -” her mind flew off a ramp into the open air, the pieces of the puzzle coming together. “They’re working for Juno,” she said in a hoarse whisper.

Cassian’s hands tightened on the steering wheel, before the van leapt forward as he slammed his foot down on the accelerator. “Then we’d best get ourselves to Thera soon, shouldn’t we?”


End file.
